How to make people actually read your emails (hint: it’s not just great copy)
In a world of SEO, GEO, PPC, and all kinds of other shiny acronyms, don’t overlook email as a super-powerful marketing channel. It’s still the joint second most leveraged channel by marketers (along with organic social media), and it’s ranked fifth in terms of ROI, so not to be sniffed at.
‘But no one reads their emails!’ We hear you cry.
The good news is that they absolutely do. The bad news is that it takes a little hard work and thinking time to win their attention.
But have no fear – your friendly neighbourhood copywriters are here to give you the lowdown on what you can do to increase opens, clicks, and conversions.
How to get your emails read
It (hopefully) goes without saying that one of the best ways to get people to actually want to read your emails is to make sure they’re really well-written and on-brand. But we’re not here to state the obvious.
So let’s assume your emails sound like the absolute bees' knees, but they’re still not getting the attention they deserve. Here’s what you can do about it.
Write about what people actually care about
Like with any marketing, it’s tempting to go heavy on promotion. ‘Buy our thing, sign up for our course, look how great we are, give us your money!’ But it’s just not what your audience wants to hear.
If you want people to buy, you need to build their trust, so start by working out what they actually care about – their pain points, questions they might have, new developments in your area – and write about that.
Segment your audience
As much as we’d all like to think they do, not everyone wants to hear everything you’ve got to say. What’s super important, relevant and interesting to one person will be a certified snoozefest to another. And if you try to appeal to everyone at once, you’ll end up with a whole pile of nothing.
Luckily, all good email marketing platforms let you easily segment your mailing lists. That means you can split them into specific groups and only send them the content that’s actually relevant. Once your audience realises you actually know what they want to read, they’re far more likely to open whatever you send their way. In fact, segmentation increases open rates by 30% and click-through rates by 50%. Not bad, eh?
Put thought into subject lines
Just because the subject line’s short doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve care and attention. And that goes for your preview text, too. These short lines of copy are two of the only clues your audience has about whether opening your email is worth their precious time. So make them good.
Some general rules to get you started:
Be specific – ‘April newsletter’ is far too vague for anyone to care about.
Leave something to the imagination – you don’t need to be overly click-baity, but you can open a curiosity door with something like, ‘The one thing people get wrong about subject lines’.
Make good on your promises – don’t tease your audience with an interesting subject line and then fail to deliver what you promised.
Optimise sending times
Working out the best time to send your emails can be more of an art than a science. But a little common sense can go a long way. If your audience is busy mums, don’t email them at peak school-run time – that kind of thing.
Plus, a lot of email marketing platforms can do the heavy lifting for you (depending on your subscription), and optimise your sending time based on your audience and past open rates.
A/B test
There’s only one way to know what’s really working: test it. And what are marketers if not scientists? Try A/B testing: sending two almost identical emails to two groups in your list, with just one thing changed, and see which one gets better open rates, click-throughs, and conversions to test what’s working.
You could test things like:
Your subject lines
Your CTAs
The order of your email
Sending times
Continually check what’s working (and what’s not) to make your emails better and better.
Regularly purge your mailing list
No matter what you do, some people will just never open your emails. That could be for any number of reasons – maybe they subscribed by accident, or your brand just isn’t relevant to them any more, and they haven’t got around to unsubscribing. That’s okay, you can do it for them.
When your emails are regularly going unopened, it can affect your sender reputation and take your carefully crafted content straight to the spam folder. Ouch. So send a semi-regular email to anyone on your list who hasn’t engaged for a while to get them back in the fold. If they still don’t take any action, you can take them off your list and consider your sender reputation saved.
Open rate isn’t the end of the story
We’ve talked a lot here about getting people to open and read your emails, but that’s only the start of the story. You could send the most interesting, engaging emails in the history of the channel, but it means diddly squat if your audience isn’t doing anything else after reading them.
Once you know your emails are being opened, that’s when the real work begins to drive the clicks and conversions your business needs to thrive.
For that, you need to:
Know your audience like the back of your hand.
Have crystal clear brand and product messaging.
Understand where your readers are in the marketing funnel and how to nudge them along to the next stage.
Luckily for you, we can help with all of that. If you’re ready to turn your emails into kick-ass conversion drivers, get in touch and let’s chat.
