MBA987 5 Ways to Increase Your Email Open & Click Rates + Free Ride Friday!

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Hey there. Today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away easy course. It's a 30 day course on how to build and launch your own online course in 30 days. We sell it for $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but it's yours for free if you win and all you gotta do is leave us an iTunes rating and review to enter our weekly random draw on Freeride Fridays. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that gives you more in less time with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teach Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at100mba.net and in today's episode, I'm going to share with you five easy ways to improve your email open and click through rates. In any business, you're going to be sending emails for marketing purposes and you're going to want people to open those emails. How do you increase your open rates and the click through rates so people actually click on the things you're asking them to do? That is the challenge. I've been doing this for years and I want to share with you five strategies that are kind of my go to strategies every time I compose a marketing email. These are five things I focus on because these are the five things I find make the most effect that really help increase my open rates as well as click through rates with my marketing emails. And most of these are just straightforward and you can implement them in minutes. And some of them are so simple, I was so surprised how much of a difference they make. Well, let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I find that the more time and effort I spend on my email marketing, the better the results. But I understand you've got lots of other things to do in your business. So I want to give you the five strategies, five things you really should look at, you really should focus on and spend the most time on when you're composing these emails to improve the number of people that are opening these emails. As well as taking action, these emails are obviously asking them to do something, whether it's to check out your latest podcast episode or take advantage of your latest promotion. Let's start with number one, and that is subject lines. Your subject line is really the first indication if somebody wants to open your email or not. When it comes to email marketing, it's sort of like a step by step process. You gotta get them to open the email first, then you gotta get them to read it, then you want them to take action. You can't jump steps here. So we're going to start with making sure that we have the best chance of getting him to open the email. I want to reference episode 9 23. It's a guest teacher lesson with Sean D'. Souza. The lesson was three ways on how to write intensely curious headlines. And headlines can be also subject lines. So you want to check out that episode for more information about that. It was a great, great guest teacher lesson. But when it comes to subject lines, you want to pique people's curiosity without being disingenuous and you want to make sure that it's actually relevant to what you're actually saying or what the email is about. Don't mislead people. That's an easy way to get unsubscribers and get reported. It's going to be bad news for you and your business. And email marketing in your business, your email marketing provider can ban you. So be genuine, be honest, but pique their curiosity. Have fun with it. For example, a couple years back we did a Mother's Day promotion for the Hundred dollar mba and I wanted to share my own mother's story within the promotion. And the subject line was why my mom is the biggest hustler on the planet. When People think of somebody who hustles, they think of Gary Vaynerchuk, they think of gritty entrepreneurs, but they also don't think about a mother. So it piqued people's curiosity and I showed in the email why my mom was a serious hustler. She migrated from Egypt to America, had to learn a new language, had to do her degree all over, start her career from scratch, and basically not spend a dime on herself for years so she can fulfill her dream. So the subject line really got people curious. You could be funny with it if you want. When I do an email cleanup where I want people to take action or I will unsubscribe them to our list, a great subject line can be how could we be lovers if we can't be friends? Yes, we're referencing Michael Bolton's classic song and I might even put a Michael Bolton gif in the email. But hey, it got people thinking and it has a lot to do with what the email's about. Hey, can we be friends here? So do you want to stay on the email list or not? So spend some time in crafting interesting, curious, and maybe even just entertaining subject lines that are correlated to the topic of the actual email. Number two, when it comes to the body of the email, you got them opening. Now the subject line got them to open the email, now you got to get them to read it. So when it comes to the body of the email, keep it short and to the point. Now I know that sometimes you have to put in a lot of information and we'll talk about how to break things up to make it easier later in a second. But when you write and draft your email, ask yourself what you can cut out, what can you minimize, what can you clean, chop it down to the minimal as possible. Why people are busy, they don't have time to read, you know, a five page email. If you can keep your email under 200 words, that would be great. Hundred words. Even better. When you're short and to the point, people appreciate it and they have a higher likelihood of reading the email if it's short. Because remember, we need to get them to read the email. So step one is open, second read, third click, right, take action. So they're not going to take action if they don't know what they're taking action on. They need to read the email. So by keeping it short, keeping it to the point, not long winded, this really helps a lot. I actually learned this technique from Noah Kagan. I'm on his okdork dot com newsletter. His newsletters are really short and to the point. I read every single one of them because of that. So I really try my best when I send out emails for marketing purposes to keep it super short. And when I say super short, I say as short as possible. I know that you got to put information there. You may want to do a little bit of storytelling like I did with my Mother's Day promotion, but edit as much as possible to keep it as short as possible. Number three, if you have to go over a little bit, you have to make it a little bit longer to get your point across to sell your product or service, to give more information about what's included. Break it Up One of the worst things you can do with email is have long paragraphs. As a rule of thumb, I don't like to have more than three lines in a row, so I'll start a new paragraph to just break it up. The eyes need a rest when you're reading and you have gaps between each paragraph. When you have gaps between each line, you tend to go to the next line or feel like, okay, I can get through this paragraph because it's short. If I want to emphasize something, I usually just like to have a one liner and start another paragraph. So break up your paragraphs. Don't have long winded paragraphs. Have gaps between your paragraphs to make it easy on the eye to read. I learned this technique from Neville Medora from copywritingcourse.com Copywriting courses K for copy and course is K and breaking things up really makes it easy to read. And even if you have a lot of content by having these gaps and having these short paragraphs and it just allows you to go from one paragraph to another with ease. Number four, do not be afraid to use colors and bolding, especially bolding. I like to bold the most important parts of the email. Most important points I'm trying to drive home as well as the call to action what I want them to do. Basically if I just read the bold text in the email, I should get the gist of the email and exactly what is required of me as a reader or what is being asked of me. So basically the bold is the outline and the rest is the meat. So use bold text because some people scan their emails and they want to know really quickly what is this all about? What is being offered here? What do I need to do or what can I do? Some people just like using black bold. Some people like to do bold and red or bold and blue. You may want to use your branding colors. But the point here is that just keep it consistent. So the bold is kind of like the highlights of the email. So keep it all blue or all black or all red or whatever you like to do. So all this is making it easier 1 to open the email, 2 to read the email. And the bold actually helps them take action. If the call to action is in bold, it highlights what I need to do, what's in it for me, how much this offer is for, what's the discount, what's the deadline, all that kind of stuff. All the important pieces are there for me, easy to read, and it makes it easy for me to take action. If that's not bolded, I might miss it, I might not see it, and may not take action.

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Number five, the fifth strategy, and this is all about the call to action. Your call to action is going to be a link to a page to a checkout page to something, right? You need to make sure there's a single call to action on each email. Do not ask people to do multiple things. You want them to do one thing, whether it's to buy something using a coupon or to subscribe to something or to share on social. But if you ask people to do multiple things, they're not going to do anything. It's too overwhelming. You want them to just do one thing. So the whole email is to drive them to that one call to action, that one click. Now you can mention or hyperlink this link throughout the email so it's featured several times. So attend my webinar and that can be highlighted with the link to the registration page. And then again I can put a button below saying click this button to register or I can put a link register here. This is all the same link and the same call to action multiple times. But it's the same Thing I'm driving them to the same action. So have one single call to action mentioned multiple times in your email. If it's just there once, they might not see that hyperlink. I like to experiment and use hyperlinks or create a button inside my email and use that. I'll sometimes split test it where I'll send half my list, just a button, or sometimes half my list a link. Or I use both and take a look at how many clicked the buttons and how many people clicked the actual link. The more emails you send with a single call to action being mentioned several times in that email, the better chances you're going to have to learning what your actual users or your actual subscribers do. But you gotta have one single call to action, one link mentioned several times and in several ways so you can be able to see what works best. All right, to recap the five things to increase your open and click through rates on your marketing emails. Number one, subject lines. Take some time to craft great subject lines that have them guessing, have them feeling curious about what's in this email. Have some fun with it. Number two, keep the email short and sweet. Don't to the point so they can actually read it. Number three, if you have to go a little bit long with the information and the details, break it up with gaps. No long paragraphs, three lines max for each paragraph. Number four, use bolding. And you would like to use color as well. You can do that, but bold with the same color all the highlighted information. So if I read just the bold I get the gist of the actual email as well as the call to action what you want me to do. And number five, a single call to action. Same link mentioned several times, more than once and even in different ways. Buttons, links, hyperlinks to text. You can experiment, split test to see what works. All right guys, there you have it. Those are the five ways to increase your open rates and your click through rates. Remember, you got to get them to open first, then you got to get them to read, consume the information, consume the call to action. And that leads to the actual action of clicking on a link to so they get to the place you want them to go. All right, Today's episode is not over though. Because it's Free Ride Friday. I got to give away a lifetime membership to Easy Course. Let's see who won this week's Free ride and the winner is Andrew Dunn. 6 Andrew says great investment of time. 5 stars, perfect length and always useful Homer. Also recaps at the end of each episode in a super helpful way. Well, thank you Andrew Dunn for that awesome review. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. So email me at omar100-mba net so I can hook you up with the Lifetime Membership 2 Easy Course or $500 course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an iTunes rating interview and you enter our weekly random draw every Friday. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this I'm a true believer in email marketing. With all the noise that's going on in social media, email is becoming so, so important. Our inbox is becoming a place where we all cherish and the value of access to somebody's inbox is becoming more and more valuable. So work on your email marketing and work on these strategies and you won't regret it. On Monday I will be reviewing a book I recently read called SEO 2008. If you're interested in search engine optimization, this is a no nonsense book that I've read that I want to share with you. Its insights, its takeaways and why you should read it too. So so hit subscribe so you don't miss that and I'll check you. Then take care.

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