The Fastest and Easiest Way To Increase Your Open Rate

0:00Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top-level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. All right, so today we are going to talk about the fastest and easiest way to increase your open rate. In this case, we're talking about email, could be for SMS as well, but I'm mostly talking about email here. And so this one's going to be a short one. Neil and I are going to give our thoughts here. So I can go first and then Neil, you can go second.

0:36And so look, if you want to increase your email open rate, this seems counterintuitive But what really matters in the very beginning is how you set your first impression. And so when you think about meeting a person for the first time, how did you feel about that person? Because that first impression holds a lot of weight. It's just like how a headline holds a lot of weight as well. And so your first impression actually makes a big difference. And so like how you go about when someone opts into your email list, right? Is your thank you page just thank you for subscribing? Or does it go further than that?

1:07Is your welcome email a lot further? So are you going to say, hey, like, here's what to do next. Here's what you can expect from this. We're super excited to see you. Here's some case studies, whatever it is exactly. If you have a good welcome email open rate, like on your thank you page, and then also your welcome email, that open rate, let's say it's like 50 % or so, you're likely to have a good overall open rate around that range. It might not be 50%. It might be a little lower than that. But because you set such a good first impression and because you are not just like, oh, thank you for subscribing.

1:35Prepare for some other emails from us. Like that's not exciting. If it's, hey, thank you for subscribing. Here's where you're going to get. Here's what you should do. blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It's like, you give such a good first impression that people are looking forward to the next email. And that's the key thing here. The key thing with email marketing is you want to get people to continue to look forward to the next email. Otherwise, there's no point they're going to forget you and people are busy with their days. So keep in mind, good first impression and thank you page good first impression with your welcome email, and you're going to be in a much better spot.

2:02So we've at least me I've talked about in the past things like scrub your list. You need it to be super clean. Don't send emails to people who aren't opening because if you do that, you're going to go into the other inbox and all these things do open up your open rate. But I've done a lot of tests. Eric, you want to guess what the number one thing that I found to increase open rate is? It's not actually a tactic or a strategy. It's not even how much of a rapport you build with your readers. It's not your double opt-in. I can't imagine it being that. It's not double opt-in. Funny enough, it's how new your content is.

2:36And here's what I mean by that. So check this out. We do a ton of emails. We send email blasts every Tuesday, Saturday, and then sometimes my team has one on Thursday and that's on our main list. And then there's other stuff that my team does with drips and stuff like that or webinar signups. If I end up sending out an email for some new content, not new content that I'm just writing, right? I'm talking about new stuff. So for example, if I talk about the 25 best Chrome SEO extensions, people already heard about that. Even if it's not for me, they've heard about it from other people. Nothing new, nothing novel, not going to get great open rates.

3:15I still probably average between 25, 30 % for those. But if I send out an email on Google's rolling out a new algorithm this week, this is what you need to know. You're talking about like a 40 plus percent open rate. So if the content is new, and what I mean by new is non-regurgitated content, stuff that people haven't read about before, that stuff does extremely well and the open rates are the best. But the same goes for writing social content and blog content. It all actually goes hand in hand. If you create content that's not regurgitated and it's new, not new as in this is the first time you're writing about it or filming a video about it, but I'm talking about new in the aspect that other people haven't really heard about it.

3:58That's what gets the most likes, the most shares and the best open rates, whether you're sending out an email blast or SMS, although SMS isn't really as much opens because it all gets delivered. that technically it is opens, but where you really see the big driver in SMS is the click rate. That's the easiest and the most accurate one to track with SMS. But when we look at it is it's like, how can you just create new content that no one's ever read about before or very few people have read about before or watch before? Because when you include that kind of stuff in your marketing materials through communication like emails, your open rates just go through the roof.

4:33And that's the key. Like the other stuff we talk about, like scrub your list and make sure that you build rapport with people early on. Yeah, those are all tactics. But the root of the problem with poor open rates really comes down to the content quality and the type in it. And when I say content quality and type, it's even if it's really well written, people are tired of reading the same crap that they already read about three years ago, or listening to the same stuff that they already listened to five months ago. It's the new stuff is what does really well. Okay, so here's what I'll say. We're kind of saying the same things.

5:05So it's when you're producing new stuff and it's novel, people can look forward to the next one, right? If you're consistent with that, then you should be able to continue to grow. This actually dovetails into what we're planning to do with this podcast, right? Because some people will say, oh, like we're saying the same thing over and over. Like that's why we're going to be doing more reactionary stuff. And so, you know, leave a comment, you know, subscribe to us on YouTube. We're going to be doing a lot more of that because I think our brains are better utilized for that. We're going to be talking about that from a business and a macro and a marketing perspective.

5:32And we're going to be sharing new marketing stuff too. so you get a mix of the best business and the best marketing material as well. And that's gonna keep you continue to look forward to continue opening these podcasts, right? It's kind of very similar. Like you can do the same thing for SMS. For any form of content at all, you have to keep people engaged. And how do you do that? You have to keep things novel. You have to keep things interesting because human beings like things that are interesting, right? So it's still the same thing at the very end of the day. You have to get people to look forward to the next piece of content.

6:00If you're saying the same stuff over and over, you're not gonna do as well. Anything else? Oh, that's it. All right. Don't forget to subscribe to us on YouTube and also rate, review, subscribe. Leave your email. We'll pick a lucky winner to come ask a question live on this pod. And we will see you later. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show. And visit marketingschool.io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. That's marketingschool.io.

6:36Until next time, class dismissed.