How to Have Crazy-High Email Marketing Open Rates

It took me YEARS of creating content for my email marketing to realize that absolutely no one wants to hear my talk about my day job - helping brands sell into Walmart and Amazon.

And that's interesting, considering I have just under 10,000 contacts in my email database - almost all from LinkedIn, and almost all from the supplier world.

What the data tells me instead is that almost half of my audience just wants me to talk about my life.

That includes where I take the kids on Spring Break. Opening up my marriage. My recent divorce. The new boyfriend. How to attract your ideal person or client into your life. Sex.

You know... all the stuff other people WON'T tell you.

Humans want to feel connected to you. 

Want people to actually want to receive your emails?

Be a real human.

And here are a few other tips I have.

1. Start showing up authentically to your whole email list.

If this scares the dickens out of you, start small. Maybe share your favorite recipe. Or where you love to vacation. One time I shared 10 tips to make travel easier, after coming off of a week long trip with the family. That was pretty safe, posed me as a subject matter expert, and actually helped people out.

2. Only send emails to people who actually open them.

This alone will increase your overall open rates. I went from a 2% open rate, to a 40% open rate.

You can do this by unsubscribing all of the folks on your list that never open your emails. Save them for later. 

Once a year I send out an email to try to reengage them. If they do open my emails again, then I throw them back into the Engaged list.

3. Look at your data.

Actually take a look every now and then about which emails get the highest open rates, then do more of that.

Did you use emoji's in the subject, and in turn got extra engagement?

Give your audience what they want more of... I mean that is the entire reason for showing up in the inbox anyway... right?

4. Don't overthink your email subject matter

I had a call with a friend about a year ago and he was absolutely distraught trying to figure out what to write about.

He wanted all kinds of analytics to tell him the absolute best subjects, and of course they all had to do with a REALLY boring work subject.

I told him to just show up real. And nerdy. And he's hunky so show his face.

His readers would open his emails and read them because he was an interesting guy.

It's that simple!

5. Write email marketing content when you are inspired, your cup is full, & you have space.

I write all of these blogs on Sundays. 

My house is chill. I'm playing some coffeeshop playlist on Spotify that me and 4 million other humans have liked (wow!).

 I've had some amazing coffee that my partner made for me. 

I've been well f*cked this morning. 

And content is POURING out of my fingers (this is my second blog post in an hour).

So find a time when you're all filled up, and feeling inspired. ❤️