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Increase Your Email Open Rate & Clicks with 5 Expert Email Marketing Tips
•Dana Snyder•Episode 33
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The average person receives over 100 emails a DAY! But what is it that gets you to open an email? Was it the juicy subject line? Was it because you trust that person? Or was there an urgency factor?
Having strategies for your email marketing, acquisition and email design are so important, which is why I’ve tapped five of my favorite email marketing experts to share a quick fire tip with you. You’ll hear about the importance of personalization and why we need to avoid boring subject lines if we want our open rates to increase.
Where do you struggle with your email marketing efforts? Is it in the acquisition of getting new people on your email list? Is it in drafting the emails? Is it getting those open rates? Or do you have an incredible email story to share that everyone should hear? Drop me a note on LinkedIn or Instagram either way. I look forward to hearing from you.
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SPEAKER_03
Hey there, thank you so much for clicking play on today's episode. I have two very exciting announcements I wanted to share with you before we dive into today's episode. Number one, if you are ready to find, prime, and excite your supporters this Giving Tuesday and throughout giving season, I am launching a brand spank and new live workshop series called Grow Your Gifts with Facebook and Instagram ads. This series will be limited to a very small group for personalized support. So if that sounds intriguing to you, if you are interested, you can visit positiveequation.com backslash grow your gifts to sign up for the interest list, or you can click the link in the show notes. All right, drum roll. Next exciting announcement applications are now open for the 2023 Mastermind. It sounds so funny to say 2023. And this is where I'm going to help five organizations build and launch their monthly giving programs. So you can find out more at positiveequation.com backslash mastermind. And I just have to say I am over the moon and so pumped to share with you the six monthly giving programs we launched this summer. They are amazing and everyone did such a great job. Next year, there will only be five spots open. And this is to work with a copywriter, a website designer, a graphic designer, a video editor, and myself on social ads to build and launch and debut your beautiful recurring donor program. So again, this program will run January through March. This sold out in one week this summer. So if you're interested, please fill out the application, asap at positiveequation.com backslash mastermind, and you and I will jump on the phone together to see if you're a good fit. So with that, no further announcements. Enjoy the show. Hey there, you're listening to the Missions to Movements Podcast, and I'm your host, Dana Snyder, digital strategist for nonprofits and founder and CEO of Positive Equation. This show highlights the digital strategies of organizations making a positive impact in the world. Ready to learn the latest trends, actionable tips, and the real stories from behind the feed? Let's transform your mission into a movement. Emails. Holy moly, do we get a lot of them? So let me ask you: do you ever think about why? Why you opened that one email? Was it because of a juicy subject line? Was it because you trust that person? Or was there an urgency? Or why do you even think you click through in an email once you do open it? And why do you delete it? When the average person receives more than 100 emails a day, that's right, 100 emails a day. That's average. So there's higher than that, too. Really having strategies for your email marketing acquisition and email design are so important. And today I really want to focus on the latter. So once you have the subscriber on your list, how do you encourage them to take action? I shared a LinkedIn post asking for email marketing experts to ideally have one person get on the show and we would talk about it. And I got such a great response that instead of just interviewing one person, I asked a bunch of the recommendations of colleagues to share a quick fire tip with you. So I'm gonna have five experts share quick fire 90 second, roughly, tips with you all about email marketing. And if you hear something mentioned twice from an expert, you know it's extra important. So big thank you to Hannah, John, Patty, Caitlin, and Christina. I'm gonna link to all of their businesses below in the show notes. Let's go ahead and roll the greatness.
SPEAKER_00
Personalization is popular. You can get a personalized mug, ornament, or even socks. It doesn't stop there. People want personalized emails too. One study found that 60% of people receive generic emails and 78% feel frustrated by them. It's no surprise, people engage better with personalized emails. They get up to six times more conversions. It's no longer enough to only use a person's first name and the salutation and call it personalized. Here are a few tips. Segment your audience based on their interests and or behaviors. For instance, group supporters who give to certain projects, or people who engage with the same type of topics or content on your website. Write specific copy to go with your segmented list, and don't forget to personalize the image. If your supporter is a dog lover, include a photo of a dog. Cat photos for your cat lovers. You get the idea. Make an email look and sound like it is from a person. Consider a more conversational style tone and send a plain text-looking email instead of one with multiple images and colors. The more personalized an email is, from subject line to Postscript, the better it will perform.
SPEAKER_01
Hey, I'm Hannah, and this is my 90-second tip for today. The people reading your emails are humans. If that sounds underwhelming, let me tell you something. As an email strategist and as a person just receiving daily emails in my inbox from different brands, it seems like the brands out there don't know this. Because the emails aren't written as though they're going to a human. They're written stuffy, they're written proper, and that's a shame. So you might be thinking, okay, lovely, write um email to a human, but how does that work? I'm gonna give you five rapid fire tips. Right like you would to a friend. Easy, flexible, simple. Number two, no stuffy language or jargon that ties back into number one. Number three, your email should come from a person, a real person. So don't use your brand as the send the name. Use a person as a send the name. So for example, don't go with green frog, go with Jennifer Green Frog.
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Okay.
SPEAKER_01
Number four, avoid boring subject lines. You want people to read that email, you want them to open it and try to make it interesting. And number five, don't use too many call to actions. Too many call to actions confuses people and they just won't open anything. People have this thing of if we see too many things, we just it gets it confuses us and we just X out of that email. And you don't want that to happen, right? These five tips all go back to the same idea. The people reading your emails are human, right to a human, because you want to connect to them and that's how you're gonna sell to them.
SPEAKER_02
Hi, my name is Patty Breach. I'm with the Purpose Collective, and my email marketing tip is to use the word you as much as possible in every message that you send. So as organizations, we tend to talk about ourselves a lot. We send emails that say, here's what we've been doing. We just launched an initiative, we held an event recently, we won this award. We, we, we, we. And the effect that this can have on your supporters is they start to wonder, why is this relevant to me? What's in it for me? What does this have to do with me? So a really simple shift that you can make is to go from we focused language to you focused language. That means saying things like, you're changing lives, you're making the world a better place. Thanks to your support, all of this is possible. We wanted to share this with you as one of our closest supporters. We'd love to see you and invite you to our event. We're grateful for you. You're wonderful. We're so glad you're on this journey with us. You is the magic word to use in all of your emails. And ideally, it should outnumber the word we in every message that you send. If you can do that, your messages are going to be a lot more impactful.
SPEAKER_04
Hey Dana, it's Caitlin. The number one email tip I have for nonprofit marketers is one that you'll hear over and over. Segment and personalize. The more you can personalize your emails to your audience, the more likely they are to take action. Some examples may be to include their first name, acknowledge their prior activity with your organization, and messaging and graphics that speak to their interests depending on their past actions. If it's a fundraising email, you can include dynamic asks based off their giving history and segment by donor type. So think lapse donors, active donors, or potential donors. Again, each message should be unique depending on the audience's motivation. By making your emails relevant and personalized, you'll cultivate your supporters and see an increased return on your investment. Hope this helps and have a good one.
SPEAKER_05
Imagine going fishing with no bait at the end of your line. It'd be pretty hard to catch a fish, right? That's what so many organizations are doing with their email subject lines. They're writing things like October update and summer news, and no one is excited about reading and opening those newsletters, right? You spent all of this time actually crafting an amazing newsletter, an amazing story. But when you pair it with a really boring subject line, people scroll on by. So your first challenge is getting people to open your email. The good news is you don't have to sound like a tabloid or have some super provocative or controversial email subject line to get people to open it. But you do need to start sounding like you, your voice, your organization, your values. That's what I did. I got a lot more cheeky, a lot more straightforward with my email subject lines and my open rates shot up. The next thing I want you to think about is discovering what gets you to open emails, what gets you to inspire to click open instead of delete or scroll on by. Keep a list of inspiring subject lines to get you your ideas percolating. Asking questions and email subject lines work really, really well. And last but not least, write your email subject line last. That's what I do. Write the content first and see where the content gets you so you can write that email subject line last. I'm Christina Edwards. I'm the founder of Splendid Consulting, and I love email marketing. Hope this resonated with you.
SPEAKER_03
How awesome were all of those email marketing tips. Thank you so much to each of you. Please, again, go down in the show notes and you can check out each of their individual businesses. And I just wanted to share in regards to email, I got the best compliment from one of my mastermind students this week. And she let me know that she said, I always open my emails from you because I know there's valuable information inside and it's clean and beautiful to read. Y'all, that was just magic to my ears. I spend so much time on making sure that my emails are of quality and really take into consideration the fact that you do probably get hundreds of emails per day. So I really try and make them quick to the point and beneficial for you. How can you make your supporters feel the same for them to give you that feedback? So I want to know where do you struggle with your email marketing efforts? Is it in the acquisition of getting new people on your email list? Um, is it in drafting the emails? Is it getting those open rates, those click-throughs? Or do you have an incredible email story to share that everyone should hear? Please drop me a note on LinkedIn or Instagram, either way. I look forward to hearing from you, and I'll see you next week. Can you tell I love talking all things digital? To make this show better, I'd be so grateful for your feedback. Leave a review, take a screenshot of this episode, share it on Instagram stories, and tag positive equation with one e so I can reshare and connect with you.
