How To Increase Your Open Rates (They're Wrong But…)

Want to know how to increase the open rate of your emails? We talked about open rates before. And you'll probably already know that we believe they're wrong.

But regardless of what the data says (and whether it's right or wrong), you still want people to open your emails.

So how do you do that?

Here you go.

You're welcome!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

(0:11) Want to make your sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.

(5:23) Why your open rates are wrong.

(10:12) Your reputation is what gets people to open your emails.

(15:00) Create compound curiosity and use open loops.

(18:54) Write shorter emails.

(20:15) Be regular and become a habit in someone's life.

(25:48) Remove benefits from your subject lines.

(28:41) Build a list of people who want to read your emails.

(31:12) Vary the lenght of your subject lines and break patterns.

(35:36) Subject line of the week.

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Why your open rates are wrong

We’ve been talking for years about the fact that open rates are wrong, and now we're telling you how to improve them? Don't worry - we haven’t changed our minds. Generally speaking, open rates are wrong - they might be higher or lower than whatever number you see in your email marketing platform. It's probably lower, but it's hard to tell.

And you certainly should never make any decisions at the back of an individual subscriber opening (or not opening) an email. Because the technology used to track open rates is flawed. Some platforms (like Apple) tend to mark all emails as open and others (like Android) mark them all as unopened. So you can't trust that number.

But what you can do is look at the overarching number of emails sent over a certain period of time and work out whether the open rate was up or down relative to the previous day. Open rates are consistently inaccurate, but they're incorrect relative to one another.

Having said that, if you notice your open rates have gone up over the last few months, it may not mean you're doing something brilliantly. It could be because everyone's open rates have gone up in the reporting over the past few months. This is simply a change in the number displayed by your email platform - it doesn't mean more people are opening your emails.

But while we don't want to pay too much attention to that number, we do need people to open our emails. So let's talk about the strategies to your subscribers to do just that, regardless of what your open rates say.

Your reputation is what gets people to open your emails

The first thing we want you to realise is that what gets your emails opened is not your subject line – it’s your reputation. And the evidence of that is in the fact that if you get an email from a friend or family, you’ll open it – regardless of what’s in the subject line (or even if that’s empty). But if the email comes from a source that doesn’t sound trustworthy or beneficial to you, you'll leave it (and might even hit the spam button) - no matter what the subject line is.

This proves that what counts is your reputation - that's what gets your emails opened. Seeing your name in their inbox triggers a deep, subconscious, reflex response to make someone open your email and read it. And they'll do that because they know you're not a spammy person and because they'll get value or entertainment out of your email. So don't trick people with your subject lines by saying it's going to be about something and then make it about something else! That will ruin your reputation, and people won't trust you again.

How to improve your reputation

To improve your reputation, make sure you send good emails that aren't predictable. What is the emotion people experience when they read your emails? Do they feel let down? Or are they left feeling like what they read was good, interesting, and valuable? Did they learn something or get something out of it?

If you trick someone into opening your emails today, you might get a better open rate tomorrow. But your overall open rate will be hugely damaged. So think about your subject lines as a tool that gives people a reason to read today's email as opposed to yesterday's or tomorrow's. Always try to come up with more interesting ones, but also be aware that your subject lines aren't going to be the best every single day - you may have days when you send very factual ones and not see a spike in open rates, compared to the days when you send really witty ones. And that's okay. Because your reputation is what gets your emails opened - not your subject lines.

Create compound curiosity

When you do write your subject lines, you want to give people a reason to open your emails. And we see a lot of people trying to do this but getting it a bit wrong.

For example, if you use the subject line “How I made $20,000 last month using a free Facebook group”, it sounds like you’re triggering curiosity. But this subject line already answers all the questions someone might have. We now know that you can make a bunch of money using a free Facebook group, so we now have no reason to open that email.

Instead, you want to create compound curiosity, a technique where you include more than one curious element in your subject line. We covered this before, so go and check out the episode here.

Use open loops

Another thing we do is to use open loops either within our emails or at the end of them to boost open rates for our following emails. We have two ways of doing this - one more overt and one more subtle.

The overt way of doing it is to raise a thought or a question that doesn’t get answered, acknowledged or completed until the next email. It’s a bit like when you’re walking down the street and see someone whose face you recognise but you can’t think where you know them from. It nags at you all day until you remember. Because we can’t deal with the idea of an open, unfinished thought or loop. So to tap into this, tell your subscribers that you were going to say something in an email, but you'll tell them tomorrow instead.

The more subtle way of doing this is to tell a story. And at the end of it, you casually say you'll carry on another time. You wave that bit of information into the middle of a story and continue the story the next day - that's an open loop.

Write shorter emails

In our membership The League, we get results for people because we teach you how to flip logic around and use psychology, which is not so logical. We think we're logical beings, but we're really not. So always think about non-logical ways to go about things.

And something you can do to go against the grain and be different is to make your emails shorter. This saves you time when writing but also allows you to share emails that are more to the point. So when someone sees your name in their inbox, they'll find time to read it. If they know your emails are very long, they might leave them for another day. And then before they know it, you've sent more, and they have a backlog they aren't likely to clear.

So don't do that. Keep your emails shorter, build a reputation for being someone who sends shorter emails, and you'll get more of your subscribers to consume your message.

Be regular

The next thing you can do is to be regular with your emails, so you become a habit in someone’s life. If your emails are sporadic, that's very difficult to do. In fact, you’re more likely to be an interruption. Your emails don’t necessarily have to be daily (although we believe they should be), but the more regular you are, the better. When you send out emails regularly, people know when to expect them and when to go and read them.

Ideally, what you want to do is to link existing behaviours and habits that people already have with reading your emails. If you send your emails every day first thing in the morning, for example, people are likely to read them when they're having their cup of tea and coffee. You're helping them link an existing habit with reading your emails, which means your subscribers are more likely to proactively go to their inbox to look for your email.

So tell them what you're going to do. When will you send your emails out? What...