So, I’m guessing most of you are interested in how to get more opens for your emails. And it’s quite a common question, how do I get more opens? How do I get more clicks? So, this one is looking at your opens and there are a few ways to entice more opens because you can’t force people to open your email. So how to kind of dangle the carrot, and get people to open your emails? The first is your subject lines and it goes without saying that is the first introduction to your email that lands in somebody’s inbox. The subject line and the preview text underneath it are really a way to drive people into your email to open it. So, I would say that is your number one. If you are taking any of the stuff away from this lesson, then subject lines, optimise your subject lines.
And that could be as simple as testing what works. Because again, it comes down to your audience. What resonates with your audience? What do people actually want? So, there are a number of ways to do that. You can use some capitals, you can use questions, so using a question mark, you can put emojis in your subject line. So, any way to kind of drive the eye in, you don’t want big, long subject lines that kind of go off the page. Keep it short, keep it to the point, ask a question, use emojis, anything like that, that’s going to drive attention and trigger curiosity. So, you know, don’t give the game away in the subject, you know, maybe ask a cryptic question. What you don’t want to do is be deceptive. So, you don’t want to be dishonest, you know, drive people into your, you know, email and say, oh, 50% off.
And then they go into your emails, oh, sorry, we lied. It’s only 10%. You have to be honest with people and there has to be a flow between the subject line and, and the offer, in the email, however, you can use the subject line quite effectively. So, a lot of email platforms will have the ability to split test or A/B test or multivariate test. So, what that means is basically you’re testing one email against another. So, the message to you is to split-test your subject lines, is really, really simple. Next time you are creating an email, just choose to create a split test email or an A/B test email, a multivariate test email, or whatever terminology is used in your particular platform. And just write one subject line and just change the next subject line very slightly. Now, the reason why I say that is because you don’t want to have one subject line and another one that is completely different to the first one.
You not going to learn anything. And the whole point here is by testing is to learn what’s working and why. So, use an emoji in one and not the other. Personalise one and not the other. Have a capital in one and not the other. Because actually, if you do that test two or three times, you can kind of be sure that your particular audience resonates with emojis or capitals or questions, whatever it is, the difference is. So, just have one minor, minor thing that you’re testing, and that’s a general rule of thumb for all split testing. Don’t test one complete email against another completely different email, you’re not going to learn what that trigger was that was the difference. Ok, that one got better opens fine. Ok, you’ve got the result you wanted, but you haven’t learned anything. So just slight variations. So next time you create an email subject line, just change it slightly. So split testing your subject lines is the big one. And as I said, preview text, a lot of people kind of don’t really use the preview text effectively.
Treat that as a second subject line. Just kind of go in there with maybe a little bit more or a bit more descriptive. So, you know, the hook is the subject line and then maybe just a bit more descriptive than the preview text just to kind of back up the subject line and tell people what it’s that’s in there and personalise it as well. So, if you are gathering people’s first names, which is I guess the main thing that you want to be gathering if you’re gathering any information, so you can personalise like, ‘Hey Doug’ in the subject line, you know, that’s going to draw my eye. So really kind of you to want to go for that.
The other thing is to send from a human being and not a company. So, rather [email protected] or [email protected] or [email protected] or something like that. Personalise it, send it from a person. So, next time you send an email, and again, this is something in a lot of platforms that you can test, but the sender id, the sender profile, the sender person put it from a human being. [email protected], Doug Dennison is sending you Joe or Jane Blogs an email. So, it’s a person-to-person transaction. Again, coming back to what I was saying earlier by email about being engaging. Email is about engagement. So really you want to kind of send from a human being, so a person-to-person thing. So, it’s engaging, not a company, it just appears a little bit cold, and a no-reply email address is just even colder.
It’s like, I’m not interested. This is a one-way channel, I don’t want to hear back from you, which is a bit of a red flag. It’s a no-go. So don’t do that. And if you do that, generally speaking, you’ll get more opens. And now I’ve obviously not given you a million things to take away here. I’ve just said split testing or subject lines, over-simplistic. But actually, if you get that right and you do that and you keep testing and keep testing and you understand what works and what resonates, then more and more people over time are going to open your emails. Next, we’re going to go into clicks, and that’s where we look at the content itself within the email.
