Boost Your Email Open Rates: My Top 3 Tips

I'm Kinsey Machos your host and founder of the category Queen. Welcome to the podcast for coaches, consultants, and course creators who don't just want to dominate their niche, but they desire to play in their own league. My mission is to help you unlock the power of your unique brilliance and use it as a vehicle to gain recognition, reach more people, and make more money. Not too long ago, I took a bold leap, leaving behind a six figure corporate salary with nothing more than a used MacBook and a burning desire for more freedom. Today, our brand has become globally recognized, helping thousands of female founders to become industry leading experts. Join us each week as we go on a journey together to discuss mindset, marketing and money, and more importantly, the real life discussions about balancing success with motherhood and marriage.

Because we're a community of women who build and scale impact driven businesses, but do it without sacrificing the things that matter most to us. Welcome to the category queen show. Hello my fellow category queens. So happy to be here with you today. I want to dive right in to some tips to help you boost your email open rates. Now, first of all, I have a question for you. Are you even growing your email list? Are you even nurturing your email list? I think that a lot of you are actually aware that you should have an email list, but most of you are not necessarily doing the things that you need to do in order to grow and nurture that list. When I say nurture, I mean send emails to that list at least once a week.

I think that sometimes we can get overwhelmed or confused by some of these, you know, ambiguous words if you will, like quote unquote nurture. But are you just continuing to communicate with people that are on your list? Remember, social media is good for gaining traffic, but conversions happen in the email and so growing your email list is important, but it's not by means of you should focus on growing your list and then sell your offer. Or focus on growing your list and then launch as a byproduct of you creating content and making connections and making offers to people. You will naturally grow your list by means of sharing your lead magnet, doing masterclasses, etcetera.

I have a whole other episode around email marketing, which we'll link up into the show notes, but for today I just want to focus on the subject line because this is the most important component of your email. But none of that matters if you're not actually emailing your list. So here's a quick reminder, just a gentle nudge for you to build the consistency around emailing your list, even if it's just once a week and even if it's just repurposing a piece of social media content. But let's talk about why the email subject line is so important. Well, you should know that only, I think, 85% or more of people only ever read the headline, which means that somebody's going to read the subject line of the email and never open it. So that's almost 90% of people.

So that means that this is actually the critical, most important piece of the content to determine if they're going to read the rest or not. And so it's really important to make sure your subject line is clear, it's compelling, and it's telling people they need to open that particular email. I've been doing a lot of reviews on our clients copy and content and emails, and it's really surprising how many of you are not really paying attention to those email subject lines. But again, I know that most of your brains don't work like mine, but it's really interesting how we naturally will say things like, well, nobody's clicking on my link, right? Or nobody's taking action from my emails.

But if we actually just start with the email open rate, we'll find that, oh, well, not as many people are opening the email as they should be. So if we want to think about what do we want to have as a benchmark, I think that's an important place to start. And again, every niche, everybody is going to be different, but it's helpful to have something to kind of measure yourself against. So the industry standard for open rates generally fluctuates between like 20 and 40% from what I've seen. So we'll say around 30%. Our email list is averaging about 45% to 50%. And that's what the, you know, fairly, quote unquote big list. Again, it's all kind of, you know, what's big, what's small?

If you have a smaller list, say, you know, less than 1000 or even less than 500, you know, most likely your open rates will be bigger. So as your list grows, you will see that lists or the open rates maybe shrink a little bit. But that's why we want to make sure that we're cleaning our list and we're removing people that are basically like dead weight. So they're, you know, subscribed to your list, but they're, it's all going to their junk or they're never opening them. So what that's happening is that's impacting your subscriber metrics and whichever platform you're on, I strongly recommend convertkit. But most of these services, they'll kind of rate you and it's kind of like a credit score, if you will.

And if you're not being a good steward of your email list, because it's a really important thing, you guys, that we are good stewards of the people that are opting into our things, right? And there's policies and procedures around that make sure that people like us and people like you are managing those resources appropriately and we're not being all wonky and spammy with our subscribers. And so if people aren't opening your list, your email platform will see that and they'll kind of give you like a ranking and so your deliverability will go, will be impacted by that. So that's kind of a little tangent, but this is why it's so important to really make sure you're paying attention to your metrics. So here's another component, is I find that a lot of you aren't even looking at your open rates, right.

So we're kind of like subjectively of based on how we feel, we're saying things like, people aren't clicking on my link in my emails or they're not taking action, but there's really no context around like, well, how many people are opening your list or your email and how many people are reading them, right. You have to pay attention to these numbers. So again, this is just a gentle nudge that a, you're gonna consistently email your list and then b, you're gonna consistently look at those numbers. And any email platform subscriber is obviously gonna give you a dashboard with those important numbers and you can look at it from an overall perspective and then also email by email. So for each email, you will see, you know, an open rate and a click through rate and so forth.

But let's talk about some different ways you can really boost your open rates. If you're not seeing anywhere between 24% 40, I would really strive for 40%. I think that's a really good metric and a healthy list, even if it's large. But that's what I, you know, I always love to challenge myself of, like, how do we start to increase our visibility and optimize the things that are going out to our readers? So tip number one is to use curiosity. This is the number one thing in anything that you're doing in your content, on your social media posts, on your real copy and your email subject lines really sparking that curiosity. Curiosity is just such an incredible tool. It's magical. It gets people's interest and then it keeps their interest and then it has them moving to that next step.

And so if you want to think about what this might look like when you are using things like you won't believe what happened next or the secret to the thing that no one's talking about, or are you making these common mistakes? If you're using things like these bold statements or questions, people can't not click on those things. They just can't right the way that the brain works. It really is this kind of like reward system that curiosity activates, the brain's reward system. And so when a subject line is going to pique that curiosity, the brain anticipates that reward for acquiring that new information, and it's just leading to that higher likelihood that they're going to open the email. And so this is the biggest thing that I always use.

Sometimes you will see me use a little bit more direct or straightforward subject lines, which is a different strategy. But the tip number one here is I always leverage curiosity more often than not. And I'm always thinking about this piece in regards to all pieces of content because it goes back to that brain piece, right? When we open the loop like that, our brain, it has to close the loop. And so really experimenting around what this is going to look like for you to really use questions, kind of use these like power statements that are going to create that curiosity and really thinking about using words like the best way to. Or did you know about this thing? Or the one thing you need to know about this.

We actually have a headline generator that's going to give you tons of amazing headlines, not just for your subject lines, for emails, but even, you know, the first sign of your social media content. Or you can use these for real copies. So we'll link that up into your, into the show notes. So you can grab a free copy of that just to get some brainstorming going. But these are really easy once you start to sink into them. But hands down, curiosity is the thing that I will always lean on the most. But tip number two, personalization or a personal touch. So when it comes to email marketing, obviously you're sending the same message to your entire list. But when we can incorporate a personal piece to that and it feels like it's just going to them, they're more likely to open that email.

So when it comes to the email subject line, just by way of adding their name to it. So in all or most I believe email software platforms, you can insert the name in the subject line so you can say something like, Sarah, did you see this right now? Again, just think about yourself as a consumer, right? Anything that has my name in it, I'm like 100% opening it. But the other component to more of this personalized piece is making the subject line appear a little bit more natural, right? So you'll see things like re semicolon, or is that the right word? Semicolon? Hypercolon? No. Oh, my goodness. You know what I mean, right. It's like regarding or, you know, reply or, you know, there's other things like sent from my iPhone.

So it makes it seem a little bit more natural that it's not coming from an email software platform. Now, of course, you want to be careful about these. You don't want to overuse these because people get tired of it and it kind of loses its effect if you just use it all the time. But once in a while, you can incorporate these more natural modalities, if you will, in the subject line and make them seem like they are getting kind of a handpiece, you know, a more personalized handpiece of mail. But hands down, using their name in their subject line once in a while is so highly effective. Now, a little bit more advanced within this realm of personalization is more email segmentation.

So if you're in, say, a launch or some sort of like open cart sequence, you can segment your list or have certain tags that will allow more targeted emails and therefore more targeted subject lines. So you can say something like, you know, hey, Kinsey, this special offer is for you or you left something in your cartoon, Joey. Right? So these are more around, again, if you're a little bit more advanced and you have different segments in your audience and or putting them through some sort of campaign, and it's highly effective, it is not necessary if you don't have this. But starting to play around with how you can add more of that personalization and let people know that you are still a human.

Right, you, it's human to human connection, even though it's the same email that's going to, in a lot of cases, thousands and thousands of people. Now, the last step I want to provide here in order to really boost your email open rates is to add a sense of urgency, or FOMo, if you will. So these are instances where you have limited time offers, countdowns, limited availability, exclusive offers, event reminders, things like that. You'll see me use these a lot when we're counting down to a masterclass or closing cart on a particular offer. And it's really effective now, just like the personalization and adding your name and things like that. You don't want to use this for every single email, but absolutely when the time is right.

So this would look like 24 hours only get, you know, 50% off this thing or only three days left to join us, or, hey, Kinsey, are you joining us in 1 hour or. Don't miss out. We start in 1 hour. Final call. Doors closed tonight. So there's a lot of things you can do here to make sure that, especially in some sort of cart closed sequence or if you're leading up to a promotion of a webinar, those last minute webinars or those last minute emails generate a lot of results. So for us, we get a lot of sign ups in those reminder emails that come right before the webinar, right before the conversion event, and also in cart close sequences. Those last few hours are when the majority of our buyers come in.

So the point here is that the urgency in FOMO is real. And your last minute stragglers or your people that kind of wait until the end, they need this reminder, but they won't get it if they don't open it. And in order to open it, we have to hit them with that emotional trigger of like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to miss out on something and make sure that it's incorporated in that subject line. I love this so much because you can really do due diligence in your campaigns, right? I'm always like, you know, send out those last emails, make sure you're sending multiple reminders leading up to that last big bang, right, whatever that may be. So those are my top three tips to boosting email open rates.

But at the end of the day, you just have to ask yourself the question, what is it that's going to get people to open this email? And you can think about yourself as a consumer. But if you think about, again, how do I open that curiosity loop? How do I personalize this? How do I create urgency or FOMo around this? You're going to come up with a lot of ideas, and if you steal our headline generator, you're going to come up with even more ideas and some amazing, really, formulas that you can plug into. But it all comes down to making sure that you're looking at your numbers. You would be surprised sometimes at the things that do get people's attention. But if we're not learning from that and if we're not learning what our audience does open, then it'll all be for nothing.

So don't forget to look at your numbers. But you won't have numbers if you're not emailing your list. So email your list consistently, look at the data every week and continue to make that subject line a priority so you can have a really great piece of content. But if nobody's going to actually open it, then it's all for nothing. So spend a little time really crafting that amazing subject line. Now, I do use a tool called coscheduler and I will link that site in. The show notes that this also helps you elevate your subject line even more. It will analyze it for you, it'll rate it for you, and it will give you some options. So that's another fun tool that you can use to just dial this in.

All right, my friend, I hope you enjoyed this and I will catch you next time. Hey, if you're ready to stand out online and get paying clients consistently without having to fumble your way through tech run ads or create complications funnels, I want to invite you to join us in the category queen school, where you're going to learn my simple, proven formula for getting clients online. It's risk free. You either make your money back or we'll give you a refund. Just head over to kinseymachos.com/thecqschool and join today to get instant access. We'll see you inside. That's.