Struggling to make sales through email marketing? Learn the tricks to getting your emails opened, read, and clicked on so you can make money with email marketing! How to write broadcast emails that get clicks, get open, get engagement and ultimately drive sales for your business?
Email marketing is still the engine in every digital business. This post elaborates on the six components you need to keep in mind when sending your broadcast emails - to increasing the email open rate.
1. Sender information
Your sender information is the name and email address that your emails are coming from. You set this up in your auto-responder. Your email address can be something like [email protected] but your sender information has to be your full name. The goal here is to make it look like you are a friend emailing another friend.
You want it to look exactly like a friend would receive your email when they do. If you're running e-commerce or a brand that's maybe bigger than one person know that you can have a brand character. There are a lot of ways for you to personify a brand.
Think about just being the CEO of the said brand and you as a CEO are the voice of the brand.
Mail as yourself because ultimately people like forming relationships.
We like buying from people we like and we like buying from people we trust. You're going to build trust as an individual more easily. Make sure it's coming from an email address you own and not something like Gmail or Yahoo.
2. The subject line
Your subject line is ultimately your headline. How to Write a Good Advertisement by Victor Schwab is a great contribution to the marketing industry. It was written in the 1940s and he covers 100 of the most successful headlines ever up to that point in the 1940s. He also adds the psychology of why those headlines worked. A lot of them are perfect templates for email subject lines.
Your subject line is ultimately your headline and that's one of the most important parts of your email. If your audience looks at that subject line they're either going to click or they're not going to click.
It either goes into the garbage or it gets opened. They'll consume what's in there if it gets opened. Therefore, this is a pivotal piece of content when it comes to writing emails.
Write your headline first and then the rest of your email. You can then double back to your headline and make a few checks.
Your checks can be:
- Can you make it more creative?
- Is it delivering what you are promising?
- Can you make it more curiosity-inducing to get the hook?
Give it your best shot when starting but always circle back and give it another couple of minutes before you send it away. Remember, your goal is to increase the click-through rate on your subject because that's how your content gets read.
If your contents not getting read in the body of your email, your links aren't getting clicked on and if your links aren't getting clicked on you're not making any money. A key thing to remember is what you want. Only one main idea should be teased or mentioned in the subject itself.
2.1. How to get clicks on your emails?
2.1.1. Curiosity because it gets clicks
Email subject lines like Did you see this? Have you seen this yet? or Did you check this one out?
These are few questions that grab their attention. A question is a great way to run a subject line. A question with a combo of some curiosity will get you far because you've just planted that open loop in the reader’s mind.
2.1.2. How to headlines
If you've got a how-to video or a how-to blog post that helps someone solve a very specific problem it is another great way to engage your audience. If a lot of your audience wants to know how to write great emails that get clicks and generate revenue, that right there can be the headline. The human brain works our thought patterns in a questioning format and when you pose a question to someone their brain can't help but answer that question. When that question brings a little curiosity up that can be a really powerful way.
2.1.3. Last chance emails
If you're running launches, if you've got a deadline funnel, if you got automation to where people can get a special deal up to a specific point, or if you're just closing the doors on a product or increasing the price, emails that say Last Chance get good click-through rates. It's pretty impressive.
You can't abuse any one type of subject line too much.
You should use a wide variety. If you're always doing last chance last, it might become the last chance for you to talk to your audience. They might unsubscribe because you will begin to annoy them eventually. One of the tricks is to have your virtual sales assistant go through an audit of all of your past emails and pull the subject line, the date, the open rate, and click-through rate for every email. Keep that in a spreadsheet and once a month goes back and look at past emails that got great open rates, that got great click-through rates, and ask yourself why.
- Why did that one work?
- Learned about what works.
- What kind of messaging patterns work.
- What ideas really trigger your audience.
- By looking back at the data from your open rates on your past broadcast emails you can pull a lot of meaningful information.
If you don't have a VA and you're doing this stuff yourself you can accomplish that in an hour to two per month. Your open rate is directly tied to your headline. A headline is probably the most important part of your email.
3. The hook and the payoff
When people click on the subject line that email opens inside of their app or their browser or whatever they're using. This is your chance to grab their attention and get them to read the rest of the email. This is the hook. You're trying to hook them into reading the rest. If you're using a curiosity-inducing headline you need to make sure you pay off that headline. If you say something outlandish, outrageous, or really odd and off-the-wall that's going to drive them away. Your first few sentences need to address the fact that you just asked them an open-ended question and now you need to answer that question. If you don't, they're going to feel disconnected. If your audience opens because they think they're going to get this curiosity solved. They've got an itch now that they want to be scratched. If you don't scratch that proverbial itch right away they're going to leave and won’t enjoy your emails. Pay off that question as quickly as you can. Then hook them in the idea of reading more.
Generally, you can do this by giving them the benefit of not only what that thing is that you were teasing through the subject line but why it's important that they master it. Or why it's important that they learn it.
4. Transition into a story
Story-powered marketing is huge.
When you learn the framework to write a story you have the power to play into the mental patterning that we all live with.
Every Hollywood movie we watch, every TV show that does a great job of hooking people in, even if you go back to past cultures of ancient times, storytelling is how history was handed down from generation to generation. Our brains are actually wired to receive stories and when you learn how to write stories and create stories that mimic the patterns Hollywood, TV, or great books use you’re gonna be amazed at the results that you create.
But stories don't always make sense. Sometimes you don't have a story to fill. That's when you go into benefits. If you're teaching them how to do something or how to get a goal that they want then you would talk about the benefits of them achieving the goal. You would talk about what's in it for them.
You as the author of the email need to write in a second person which means you use the word you. You're speaking directly to that individual in the email and you are telling them the benefits that they're going to experience. They're thinking about what's in it for them and your language pattern is here's what's in it for you. It connects them to your language pattern and it matches their thinking pattern. They're going to keep consuming that email. At this point, we transition to the call to action.
5. Call to action - Make them click!
Every single email you write, make sure you have a call to action.
To be really clear here, having a call to action doesn't mean you sell something in every single email. Link them to a video or blog post that is of help to them. Even linking someone and getting someone to click on the link in the email that takes them to one of your free videos is a win. That's you getting an engagement, or a conversion even though it's not the exact kind of conversion that turns into dollars.
Here's why…
You ultimately want to train your readers to click on your links. When you do promote a product, whether it's your product or an affiliate product and you have a link in there, it links them to a sales page. That's the make money moment.
You want to make sure that they've already been pre-programmed to click on your URLs in your emails. If you never send an email that has a URL and then on day 14 you send a URL they're going to be like wait a minute I don't click URLs I don't click links in this guy's emails because I've never seen one before and it doesn't compute.
Whereas, if every email that you send has a link to a blog post or something helpful, they get used to the idea. It doesn't necessarily have to be your content. It can be other people's content that is actually valuable and helps them solve their problems.
You're essentially training them to click on the links so when you do deliver that hook per se that offer in the email they're already predisposed to click. They've clicked on links in your emails before and they've had good experiences with what they got after the click. So they're happy and willing and more ready to click in that situation than if you've never sent them a link.
Even getting the click to a YouTube video, to a blog post, to a Medium article, to some third party article, third party video that you didn't even create is a positive conversion.
It’s a positive engagement and is going to get you closer to making a sale. It is generally recommended that you send three or four value emails in between every offer. Just give more value than you’re asked for.
Think of it as a virtual or theoretical bank account. You want to make sure you're depositing more money into your bank account than you're withdrawing. Every value email is the deposit. Every offer is a withdraw. You want that bank account to grow and so you put more in than you take out.
5.1. Guide them
In the call to action tell them what to do. Literally, say click the link below.
Give them the words that say the action you want them to do. Don't assume that they're going to know that. Don’t think that because you’ve hyperlinked this word they're supposed to click on it.
Make sure you actually say click the link below. Also always go in and make sure you paste the link and the hyperlink both. Gmail is really good at taking any URL and making it clickable but Yahoo is terrible. Yahoo does not make pasted URLs clickable. When you hyperlink it and make it clickable from within the editor window it's also going to track the data more effectively than expecting the browser or email client on the other end to do that for you.
Be very clear about what actions you expect them to take.
6. PS - Have a postscript
Postscript comes below your signature. Some people say that this is the most read part of an email. You can use your PS as a call to action.
You can use your PS as a way to tease what you're going to email about tomorrow.
If you plant the seed, the reader will be looking forward to what’s coming up next. You put that thought in their brain. That's what a lot of the TV shows people binge-watch like The Breaking Bad are doing. They're really good at opening a loop at the end of the episode to where you really can't stop thinking about what's going to happen next until that next episode plays. You can do this with your emails. Open a little bit of loop in the PS and then email tomorrow. It subconsciously gets the reader pre-programmed to want to open your email tomorrow.
6.1. PS as CTA
You can also use the PS as your call to action. You can tell a story in the actual body of the email then you close and at the bottom PS add - if you want help getting the same result that our hero in the story above got, click this link and you can learn about the membership program and the coaching that will get you the solution you desire.
Second CTA: Moreover, if your body copy of your email links someone to a video or a free blog post and you close after that, in the PS you can do a second call to action that offers them your membership, your personal coaching, or your paid product that takes them farther.
PS: if you really like what’s above then when you're done be sure to check out the membership where I work with people one-on-one to get that result and I'll actually work on your content for you.
PS: if you want these kinds of messages in your inbox every day go ahead and check out our membership here.
Generally, you want one action for someone to take in the email. Know what action you want the user to take before you start writing your email. Initially, it might take you 30-40 minutes to write your email, edit it, format it nicely, and send it away but with time it’s going to get down to around 15 minutes.
Summary
Email marketing is a process. You get up there step by step. This post discussed the 6 major components of your email. To recap them once again:
- Your sender information should be displayed like you are sending out a message to a friend
- Make great headlines by arousing curiosity in the reader.
- The hook and the payoffs should answer the question from the subject line itself.
- Tell them a story
- Have a call to action for your emails where you train users to click the URLs in your email.
- Close with your name and have a PS in the end.
This is ultimately the framework and the theory behind writing emails that get engagement, clicks, opens, and makes you revenue over time. It is a skill that you'll need to build. It is highly recommended you start emailing more. If you're emailing once a week, try emailing five times a week. You’ll get there one day.
