Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In today’s podcast, we’re showing you how to get more people to open your emails.
Email marketing is essential to your business and building your list is critical to success.
Unlike other forms of marketing (ex. Twitter or Facebook) if these platforms change, your email list comes with you regardless.
So, let’s find out how to build it up and how to get more people opening your emails.
You will learn:
- Why email marketing is so essential to your business from the beginning
- Why we chose Aweber as our newsletter delivery service
- How to recycle content in your newsletters
- Why it’s not necessary to launch with an autoresponder series
- The importance of collecting data and segmenting your list
- How to create descriptive subject lines
- Why you should be sending follow up emails
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle:
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show!
We may read yours on the air!
Today’s review came from Sydney, Australia.
If you want to check out reviews from listeners in other countries you can change your default review setting in iTunes, as seen below:
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- Aweber – Our email service of choice.
- Why Aweber is the backbone of our online business
- ElementaryLibrarian.com
Can’t Miss Moments:
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, on today’s podcast, we’re going to tell you how to get more people to open your emails. [spoiler title=”Click to View Transcript”]
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys. Thanks for joining us for this week’s Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about email marketing and Shane and I have been using email marketing for over two years now. We’ve done a few things right and we’ve done a lot of things wrong.
SHANE: Way more than the things we’ve done right.
JOCELYN: But along the way, we have learned a few tricks that will help you get more people to open those emails. We are going to share some of those with you today but first, we are going to read an iTunes review.
SHANE: Today’s review comes from Australia and this is the first time we’ve read a review from another country besides the United States. One of the main reasons is, we actually just learned a little while ago that you can check your reviews from other countries. Our podcast is listened to now in over 80 countries, which absolutely blows our mind, but the reviews that you look at when you’re iTunes only show one country. So we have our set for default as the United States because that’s where we are. You can actually change that to view reviews that people have left you in other countries.
iTunes and Apple doesn’t put all of those reviews in one list. They are kind of separated by country and if you have a podcast and you want to look at the other countries that you might have listened in, you look in your stat and you see that you have listeners in Australia or England or somewhere like that. You can actually change that country and look at your reviews from all over the world. All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of your reviews and at the bottom right-hand corner, there’s a little flag and that flag should be your default country. If you click that flag, you can actually go in and see other countries that have left you reviews too. You can just switch the country and I think you can do that from the main screen too. Can you, Jocelyn, is it in the…?
JOCELYN: Yeah, if you have a lot of reviews, you might not want to scroll down through all the reviews. So you can do it from the main iTunes store.
SHANE: Actually, I took a picture of where this is and I’m going to include that in the show notes on FlippedLifestyle.com./podcast18. So for those of you out there who do have a podcast, you can go check that and see where that is so you can see your reviews from all over.
JOCELYN: We do check the main English speaking countries on a regular basis but if you do leave us a review from another country maybe where English is not the primary language, let us know. Send us an email or fill out the contact form on our site so we can go and read it.
SHANE: Exactly. The review today is from HeSaid2847372. That’s the name of the reviewer that left us out a review. He says, “You guys rock. Hi guys. I’m from Sydney, Australia and I am loving your podcast plus all the other stuff you do. Keep it up. You really lit a fire under me and I have my first batch of digital products under construction right now. Onwards and upwards, cheers.”
JOCELYN: Thank you for not doing the accent.
SHANE: I was. Before I went on, I was like, “Can I please do an Australian accent?” And I got totally vetoed. So you’re not going to hear my Australian accent today.
JOCELYN: His Kentucky Australian.
SHANE: My Kentucky Australian accent. All right, thanks for that review. If you have not left us a review yet, go ahead and make sure that you do that. Head over to iTunes. Leave us a review and don’t forget to subscribe to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. We want you to know when we release new content. We release three shows a week. We have two Q&As plus our long show and we want to make sure that you’re updated on that and also subscriptions and reviews really help our rankings in iTunes and it helps us kind of accomplish our goal of getting our message out there to as many families as possible so make sure you do that after you listen to the show today.
JOCELYN: All right. Let’s dive into our topic today and that is how to get more people to open your emails. Before we talk about how to get your audience to open more of your emails, let’s talk a little bit about email list and why it is so important for you to have one if you’re starting an online business or if you already have one. If you have been following any kind of internet marketers for any amount of time, you probably heard a lot about the list and there’s a really good reason for that.
Pretty much everyone who has access to the internet has an email address. It’s not like social media where you may or may not have an account on this platform or that platform. Pretty much everybody has an email so that is one reason why it’s really important to make sure that you get the email address of people who are coming to your website who might be interested in purchasing your products.
Another reason is that email is still totally free to send. As of right now, aside from just having an address, if you subscribe to some kind of service, like through your internet service provider or something like that, but aside from that cost, email is still free so there’s no cost to sending it. You don’t have to worry about whether your message is getting out there. When you send an email, usually it does go to its recipient. It may end up in the spam folder or something like that but it does get there in some capacity. Also, you don’t have to wait or pay for your email to surface in a social media news feed. You don’t have to hope that it reaches a few of its intended recipients or maybe other people.
SHANE: We’re bashing Facebook here if you can’t tell.
JOCELYN: Yeah. You don’t have to worry about those kinds of things with email. You know that for the most part, your emails are getting where they are intended to go. Also on the flipside, sorts of bashing Facebook or other social media platforms, you can use that list to target potential customers and people who are already following you and also, you can target people who are like them. So the email list is not just for sending emails. It’s also for uploading it to social media and targeting people in that way.
You can actually do all of those things and that’s the best thing that you can do with your email marketing. There are a few limitations to emails. I mentioned before, sometimes they do go into the spam folder. So that is a little bit frustrating and sometimes, they’ll come back undeliverable. Just like anything else in life, that’s just the way it is. We love email marketing. It has been very successful for us and we think your email list is the most important asset that you have to sell your digital products.
SHANE: Another really good thing about the list is it comes with you. If Facebook goes away, Twitter goes away, or Pinterest goes away or they change the way that they do things, like a couple of years ago, you could reach all of your Facebook followers on your page. Now, you have to pay them or you’ll only be going to get your message to like 5% of your people. Twitter, Pinterest, and all these other companies will probably follow suit. The good thing about the email list is people can always get their email. You always have it no matter what happens anywhere else. If your website completely crashes, if your Facebook page gets shut down, or if your Twitter account just doesn’t work anymore.
Whatever it is, your email list is going to come with you. You own it, you control it, and it’s the best way to directly connect with somebody and also, just the amount of people you can reach. If you send an email and half your subscribers get it, there’s really nowhere else, no social media platform or anything else that you can reach that many people at once. It is absolutely critical from day one of your online business that you are collecting those email addresses from your audience and make sure that you can contact them through that.
Now, how do you do that? Before we get into tips on sending these emails and getting them opened because it doesn’t matter how big your list is if no one opens your emails, how do you collect them? Well, there are a couple of companies out there that help you collect emails, build a list, and send mass emails. Like Jocelyn said, anyone can have an email account for free but for you to be able to send out hundreds or even thousands of emails, you’re going to have to have some kind of tool to do that. There are a lot of companies out there that do that. We’ve used quite a few of them. There’s Mail Chimp and AWeber.com. Both of those are probably two of the biggest companies that are used for email list building and for newsletter delivery.
We chose AWeber and we use AWeber for a number of reasons. The first thing is it’s super easy. It has superior functionality than anything else we’ve tried. It just works. Everything in AWeber is set up to collect emails and to send messages to your subscribers. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do and you’ve got a lot of really powerful tools in there that you can create – nice newsletters, lots of graphics, – and you can do all kinds of things in AWeber to make yourself look very professional. They have awesome customer service. I’ve never had a moment in our service with AWeber where I’ve not been able to call them and get something. If I don’t know how to do something or I need to figure something out that they haven’t been able to help me with that.
We had a lot of trouble when we first started out with setting up an autoresponder and all of that is series of emails that you prewrite that everyone who subscribes to your list gets. You want to do that upfront because it’s a way to kind of automate some of your communication when people sign up for your list, but we weren’t exactly sure how to do that. I called AWeber, they sat down totally free, walked us through that process. It was really easy. They have awesome customer service but the most important thing for using AWeber is their deliverability.
Deliverability is the amount of time that email actually makes it from the moment you hit send to your audiences’ inbox.
There are a lot of companies out there. We’ve heard horror stories of where people will collect hundreds of emails and they are not getting to the inbox. They are just not making it. They will send out all these emails and maybe 50% of them actually get delivered and the rest of them end up in spam.
AWeber has a great system called a double opt-in system where when people put their email into your opt-in form, AWeber sends them a message and they have to click a link in it to prove that it’s them that signed up. Once they double opt-in, you get over 90% deliverability rate because if all of your messages are going to someone’s spam folder, then you’re not going to ever get your message to them or be able to sell any product to them. You really want to look at deliverability when you’re picking your email collection service and AWeber, by far, has the best deliverability.
JOCELYN: I actually wrote a blog post called Why AWeber is the Backbone of our Online Business and you can find that in the show notes for podcast 18. It’s just FlippedLifestyle.com/podcast18. We highly recommend AWeber. We think it’s a great service. It’s very affordable and we’ve always had really good luck with it.
SHANE: Yeah. AWeber is really affordable. It’s only $19 a month and that’s for your first 500 subscribers. It will go up later get more people on your list but that is going to be a good thing because you want your list to grow. You can actually try AWeber out for $1 a month through our partner link. If you want to check out AWeber and what they have to offer, just go to FlippedLifestyle.com/AWeber and it will take you to a landing page where you can check out their pricing and features. It’s a great way to get started. It’s only $1 a month. So you can take that first month, learn the system, and then you can start collecting emails on your website.
JOCELYN: Once you have your email list, the next thing you want to know is how to get people to open your emails, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about here today. We’re going to give you four tips that we have learned over the two-plus years that we have been doing online business and there are things that we did not do right from the start always but that we picked up along the way and have really helped us to improve those open rates because if people aren’t opening your emails, then it really doesn’t matter how many email addresses you have. It’s really important that they actually get them, open them, and consume that content.
Let’s start with tip number one and that is to recycle content from your site. This is something that I’m really learning myself in the last little bit and that’s why I wanted to include it first because it’s something that I need to tell myself as well. Don’t worry about having the perfect autoresponder. Shane mentioned earlier that an autoresponder is basically just a sequence of emails that people will automatically get once they sign up for your list. I’ve been doing this for over two years and I pretty much don’t even have an autoresponder. I have a whole three emails in my autoresponder. Most of the internet marketers out there would probably laugh at that but my site has been very successful anyway. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have a perfect autoresponder or if you don’t think it’s long enough or whatever.
I finally figured out after all this time that I can use my content. I have hundreds of blog posts on my site. I have probably dozens of free resources out there for people to download on my Elementary Librarian site. It just hit me one day with the help of some friends that I met at an event. Why in the world am I not using these things in my autoresponder? A lot of times I think people think that because I wrote it as a blog post that all of the people who come on to my website have read it, but that’s not true especially if your site has been around for a really long time. Chances are, a lot of your list may not have ever seen that blog post or may not ever see it because there are very few people that are going to sit down and read your site in its entirety.
You’re going to have a few super fans probably who will do that but for the most part, it’s just people casually coming on to your website. So don’t assume that just because you have a blog post out there that everyone has seen it. That is perfectly fine to use in your autoresponder so go through if you have a lot of blog posts, pick your best stuff, and get it ready for the autoresponder. I’m actually going through this process right now on my Elementary Librarian site. I’m getting a blog post ready to go into emails for my autoresponder. I’m working on that right now.
Constantly provide value and that’s with your blog posts, with your resources, anything that you’re putting on that email list. Make sure that you’re providing a lot of value. You want to train your list to open those emails where you’re always sharing good stuff and they know that when they click on that email from you that’s it’s always going to have something that benefits them inside. It doesn’t necessarily always have to be free things but you want to make sure that they know that when they open that email that it’s going to be something that they want to read or content that they want to consume.
By doing this, by sharing all this good information, this is going to help you to sell more products, which is ultimately our goal as internet marketers, or at least if you want to sell products, which I assume most people do. Don’t give away the farm, though. You should always have a clickable link to retrieve the resources that you’re talking about or to read the rest of the article. I would use a “click here to read more.” You always want people coming back to your website and the reason for that is because it gives them an opportunity to purchase something. I know there’s a lot of internet marketers out there who think you should have a sell button in every email. I actually disagree with that. I think that you need to sell selectively and you shouldn’t be pitching in every single email. If you do, people are probably going to stop reading them and that is sort of the opposite effect from what we want to have. Make sure you’re constantly giving value, train your list to open those emails and sell selectively.
SHANE: You can do this at the beginning too. We just had a consulting call yesterday where we told one of our consulting clients. He was just starting his website and he had a few blog posts written and he was like, “Man, but now I’ve got to sit down and write an autoresponder.” We told him, “No, you don’t. You don’t have to launch and do all these product pitches in every email or have this big sequence of events that leads to something. You can add that in later. As he was writing the blog post, we just kind of advised him, “Use those blog posts as your autoresponder and that way, you’re doubling your content so you’re not so stressed out trying to create autoresponders and blog posts and videos and all these other stuff.”
When you write a good blog post, just make it the next email in your sequence and you’re providing great content, great value in that email, give away the first three paragraphs and say, “Click here to read the rest of it” like Jocelyn said, and you’re bringing those people back to your site. Jocelyn and I have a lot of blog posts and articles on our websites, on our niche sites, but you don’t have to do it that way. If you’re just starting out, write a blog post and then use that blog post as an autoresponder so that 1) you’re doubling down on content and 2) you’re providing that value in your email list. Always give that stuff away in the email. That way, you’re not constantly asking for money. You’re constantly giving stuff and when they come back to your site, you can pitch your products.
Our second tip is to collect data and segment your list. You really want from the very beginning get as much information about the people signing up for your email list as possible. That way, you can send laser targeted emails. You don’t just want to blast your entire list with every single message that you ever send out. You shouldn’t be broadcasting to your entire list every single week. You’ve got to be a little more laser specific and kind of get the right message in front of the right people. When you first collect emails, you really just want the name and email because the more information on that first form, the less likely they are going to fill it out. So you really have to just get their email at first.
But once you’ve got that email and you’re able to contact them, there are some tricks that you can do to segment that list and break it up into smaller parts so you know what people want. One of the best tips to do this is to use links. AWeber lets you track who clicks on what links in your emails. So if I send the entire list an email and I’ve got link 1 and link 2, I can see exactly which subscribers clicked on link 1 and which subscribers clicked on link 2, and I can save them in AWeber as separate lists. That way if I have a message that needs to go to link 2 instead of link 1, I don’t have to blast link 1 with a message that they don’t want.
If you keep sending people information that they don’t want, they are going to stop opening your email. If you keep doing it more, they are eventually going to unsubscribe and that’s not what we want. We want people to stick around and become customers. Here’s an example of how I use this to segment my list on CoachXO.com, my football coaches’ website. Basically, I send out emails and they have things in them that say,“Do you prefer offense or defense as a football coach? Vote now by clicking the link” and then I’ll have two links in the email that says, “Vote for offense, click here or vote for defense, click here.” After I send this email out, I can see over a few days, 20 % of the people clicked offense, 20% of the people clicked defense.
Now I can save those two groups of people into offensive and defensive coaches. I know that this group prefers offense. These people prefer to coach offensive football and then the other people prefer to coach defensive football. When I have a product now that sells only to offensive coaches like a playbook for an offense on how to score more points, I would only send that segment that email, because the defensive coaches probably aren’t going to be as interested. They are going to open my email and be disappointed in what they found inside. This wasn’t for them and that will teach them to ignore my emails.
I want people to open the email and say, “Wow, this was exactly what I needed. This was almost written directly to me. Same thing, when I have a defensive product, I can only send it now to those coaches who are coaching defense, so the offensive coaches are left out of the loop. You can do this in other ways too like I’ve sent out emails that say, “Hey coach, I just wanted to know what level do you coach: youth football, middle school football, junior high, freshmen, or varsity?” Then, all the coaches that click these different links are telling me this demographic information about them.
If I have a youth football product that is only good for kids 12 years and below, I know only to email the youth coaches with that product. So what happens is instead of sending one big email to everybody on your list and 20% of the people open it and they eventually get sick of opening your emails because it’s never related to them, by segmenting your list, you can target specific products at specific kind of niches within your niche and that way, you are getting this huge open rates. These segments usually for me on my football site gets upwards of 70% open rates very consistently because it’s so targeted to exactly what those coaches want.
You can do this in a lot of different ways. You can ask your audience. For us, we might ask you guys, “Do you prefer to listen to the podcast, read a blog post, or interact with us on a webinar?” If we’re going to host a webinar, we could send only the people who clicked the webinar link, we could send them a message that “Hey, we’re going to host a webinar.” If you like the podcast the best, then we can send you guys a message that say, “Hey, we just released a new podcast.” If you like to read the blog post, “We just wrote a new blog post.” By segmenting, you can target your list better and you train people like Jocelyn said to open your list but you also keep them from unsubscribing because they are getting a lot of stuff that doesn’t relate to them.
JOCELYN: You can also do this in a variety of other ways. I always have a sale every year, a Black Friday sale on my library website and you can even have people vote on things. People love to vote. They love to give their opinions so I’ll send out an email sometimes for a sale and I’ll say, “Vote on the product that you would like to see on sale.” I have three different pictures. They click a picture. They go to a page on my site that says “Thank you for voting. I’ll let you know the results.” I’ll tell you a secret, everyone wins. They get the discount on the product that they want.
SHANE: That’s right.
JOCELYN: So that’s another great way of segmenting that list so that you can give them what they want while at the same time, getting that open rate up and giving them something of value to them.
SHANE: So basically, the people in Jocelyn’s audience say, “I really want product A. I don’t need product B. I’ve already bought product B. I’m going to vote for product A.” The people who need product B clicked B, the people who need product C clicked C and then Jocelyn is like, “Okay, you just told me. You specifically want it on sale so she goes ahead and puts all three products on sale but she only sends the email for product A to the people who clicked product A. So all those people told them exactly what they wanted to discount on. Jocelyn provided value and a discount.
She generously gave all of them a discount but she only told them exactly what was on sale for them. Product B people didn’t need to know product A was on sale. They didn’t want to hear about that. They wanted product B so it was a way that she could say, “What do you want? How can I help you? Here you go. I’m going to provide this value and give you this good discount.” Make sure after you get that email that you’re doing some research and you’re sending out some questions to your audience. Get that list segmented and you’ll get a lot higher open rates.
JOCELYN: All right. Let’s move on to the third tip for getting your audience to open your emails. The third tip is to use descriptive subject lines and get to the point. You don’t have to be creative with your subject lines. Don’t torment over: are there too many characters? Do I need to include their name? Should I put an exclamation point? Don’t worry about all of those little things. They are not that important in the grand scheme of things. I don’t know about you but I really hate getting emails with really desperate subject lines like “Jocelyn, I made a huge mistake” and then you have to click it to find out more.
SHANE: This tip made me a $1,000 and I’ll share it inside,” that click bait stuff like you see all over the place.
JOCELYN: Yeah I see this all the time. In fact, I probably have some sitting in my inbox right now and I just usually delete those. That’s just not the way that I like to receive emails myself. I know that a lot of people say they are successful and I’m sure that they are but for me, I just don’t like it. It just seems really desperate. I like to be really clear in my subject lines. I like to put what my email is about, what is contained in it, what I’m talking about. There’s a place for fun subject lines like what we were talking about but you shouldn’t you be doing it in every email. It shouldn’t be a desperate “click me now” type of email every single time because your audience is really going to tire of that.
Another thing that you can do that can be really successful is you can use AB Split testing for subjects and basically what that means is that I know you can do it in AWeber where you can tell it, “Send half of my email list the message with subject line A. Send the other half of the list subject line B and see which one gets higher open rates. We’ve done this several times on things that we’ve sent out and it really helps you to focus on what your audience likes to see and which one gets a better response.
SHANE: If you have a list of 1,000 people and you want to AB test it, you can say like, “I’m going to give you $25 off” and you can send that to 50 people and then you can send 50 more people, “I’m going to send you 25% off” and if the 25%, very direct headline, “I’m giving you this discount” if the 25% got opened more than the $25 offer, then when you send the email to the other 500-900 people on your list whatever it is, you can use the one that got the best open rate. We do this. We’re very, very direct. Whenever we’re selling anything especially to our email list, we will say, “My new playbook is out and it’s $97 right now.” We’re not going to screw around with someone and try to trick them to open the email and they open it and they get disappointed because if we do that, then they are not going to open the next email.
We like to use very direct subject lines. We don’t stress out over all these sales pitchy things and all the best practices that people say because we have found people don’t have a lot of time. They don’t want to mess around. We don’t want to be tricked into clicking a link or opening an email. They want to know what’s inside. If they like it, they will go in and get it, and that’s it. Make sure that when you’re using your subject lines, don’t freak out. Just tell people what’s in the email and open it. Now we do have some fun emails. I have an email in our autoresponder for Flipped Lifestyle that says, “How do you outrun a bear” and then I’ll tell the story inside about, you have to be expert enough when you’re making products online. You can do some fun things like that every once in a while but like Jocelyn said, maybe one out of five emails should do something like that.
All right, our fourth tip for getting people to open your emails is something that we have not ever seen anyone do but we have been doing this since the beginning when we first started sending out a lot of emails. It has been hugely successful for us and that is don’t give up on unopened emails. I always hear the gurus say, “I get 25% open rate and I get 30% open rate. Wow, that’s rock star status.” But then I’m like, “Wait a minute. What happened to the other 70% of the people? Where are they and why are they not opening your emails and why do you just forget about them?”
What we started doing very early on was we would send follow-up emails to the people who did not open the first email. Let’s say that I sent an email out at 9 AM on Monday morning and 40% of my list opens that email. That’s great. All day long, I get 40% of the people open it. Most people would be like, “Wow, that’s amazing. You’ve got 40% open rate.” I’m like, “Where’s the 60% that didn’t open it? We have to find those people. We have to figure out why they are not opening it. It’s not just that they are not interested in your subject or your topic most of the time. There’s probably another factor that could have caused them not to open it. Maybe the headline didn’t grab their attention. Maybe it got filtered into their spam or their promotions or their social folder, whatever, and it could have just been the time of day. Some people check their email in the morning, some people check it at lunch, some people check it at night.
We’ve got to go get all those people that didn’t open the initial email. We can’t just assume that they don’t want to read that email. In AWeber, a cool thing you can do is you can see who has opened your email and who have not opened your email, and there’s a button right on the stat screen that says, “Send an email to this group” and I can send an email through AWeber to the unopened subscribers. So what we do is, maybe like a day or two, we kind of let it filter out in case somebody opens it late. We click on the “send to unopened.” Once that list is generated, it’s a new segment. I’ll save that as a “did not open last email.” I can send them the same email that I sent the first time because they have never seen it. They didn’t open it so they don’t know what’s in it.
Maybe I’ll change something like I’ll change the headline. Maybe I’ll make it something that I think maybe catchier or something that might get their attention, and I’ll send it at a different type of day. Maybe I sent the first one at 9 AM on Monday. Well, I’ll try Thursday at noon or Friday in the evening. I’ll try different times to all the people that did not open the first email. I’m sending them the same body, the same text in the email but what that does is it gives you a better chance to catch their attention or to catch them looking at their email at a different time of day and you want that original message to get across to them, so just send them the same message with a different headline and a different time, and we have incredible success with this.
We usually get an up of probably 20 or 30 extra percent of our list opens each email because we don’t just ignore them. We’re not just satisfied with 25%, 30%, or 40% open rates. I want the rest of those people. We want to go find them and to do that, it just takes a few seconds to copy and paste the email, change the subject, change the time, send it back out, and you’ll be shocked at how many more people will actually open that second email and read that message and click through to your links. The strategy can also work with the people that have opened your email and that have clicked your links. You want to follow up with them too.
For example, a lot of times, if I have a sale or something going on, we’ll send that out in the morning and let’s say a bunch of people opens it and a bunch of people click through but the sales, I only got like maybe 5% or 6% of the people actually bought anything, well there’s a lot of reasons why that person who opened who opened and clicked your email may not have converted. They could have been at work and they didn’t want to put in their credit card and buy something at work and get in trouble with their boss.
So why not send those, the people that clicked your links, another email later in the evening when they are at home or later on the weekend, maybe on a Sunday night the next week. “Hey, I saw you open this email. You clicked this link. I thought you’re interested. It’s still for sale.” That way, you’re following up with those people too and that’s another great way to increase your conversions. So to increase your open rates, make sure you’re following up with the unopened people. Don’t just assume all those people didn’t like it. “They don’t like me anymore. They don’t want to open my email.” That’s not true. There are a lot of variables there. You’ve got to try to eliminate some of those variables and reach out to those unopened emails and they’ll probably go ahead and read those messages later on.
JOCELYN: I just want to throw in a couple of extra things that I thought of as we were discussing this about email marketing. The first thing is don’t stress out if people unsubscribe to your emails. We talked to a lot of people who are starting out in online business and they will say, “Oh I had 100 people on my list but two of them unsubscribed.”
SHANE: They crushed my soul.
JOCELYN: It’s really okay. If people are unsubscribing to your list, it’s nothing personal. They just don’t want to get emails from you and that’s really okay because they’ll probably not going to become a customer anyway and it’s all right if they unsubscribe. That’s going to happen. We have sometimes double-digit unsubscribes when we send out an email and that’s fine. That’s just part of the game. It’s part of email marketing.
SHANE: And it’s actually a good thing because you pay for the emails that you have, so why pay for emails on your list? The bigger your list is, the more you pay. Why pay for somebody that doesn’t want to hear your message?
JOCELYN: Exactly, so just try not to stress about that. I know that it does bother people when people unsubscribe but don’t take it personally. Another thing is that you need to clean out your list from time to time and this will also improve your open rate. This is something that I try to do about every six months or so. I go in and see who hasn’t opened any of my emails in the last six months. If they haven’t, then I would delete them off the list because if I have a reasonable certainty that they are not going to open my next email, why do I keep them on the list? I just name that segment “dead weight” and I delete them off.
SHANE: The thing about it is everybody throws out a big number. “I’ll show you how to get 25,000 people on your email list.” It doesn’t matter if they are all crap emails. You want quality, not quantity. We’ve had a list of 1,000 people on them before and we’ve made five-figure sales off of that. The quality of your list is so much more important so if you lose people on your email list, it really doesn’t matter.
JOCELYN: Just as on the side, I do give them an opportunity to stay on the list. I will send out one final email and it says usually, “This will be your last email from Elementary Librarian” or something like that and I do give them an opportunity to click and opt back in but that rarely happens. When I send out an email to, say, like 200 people, maybe four or five will click the link, so just something to think about if you have a lot of people who are not opening your emails, you may want to think about cutting them out a little bit. I hope that was helpful for you guys.
We’re going to go ahead into our Can’t Miss Moments segment of the show. This is where we talk about things that we were able to do that we may not have been able to do before we started an online business. Shane, what was your Can’t Miss Moment this week?
SHANE: My favorite thing that we did last week was we went on a little trip. Sometimes Jocelyn and I. We’ll just look at each other in the morning and go, “Let’s go somewhere.” We just literally grab our laptops, throw as may clothes as we can in our suitcase, and we grab the kids and jump in the car. So we drove up to Ohio this week to go to the Great Wolf Lodge indoor water park. We love indoor water parks. We try to go to them anytime we can and it was just a blast. We went up there, we took the kids, and we were actually able to get a suite. It had a couple of rooms in the actual place we stayed and we invited my brother and his wife and their kids. They have kids that are the same age as our little boy and our little girl.
We got to invite them up to do that and for free and just hang with them, swim in the water park, and I got to ride slides with my brother. We got to play with the kids in the wave pool and the lazy river and all that stuff. It was just awesome to be able to just not only do that but to incorporate and include our family and kind of give them a few days where they can have some fun too. It was just a blast to go up there and play. We stayed for like three days, I think, and just a good time with the kids on a Monday and a Tuesday and just living life and swimming, and forgetting about business for a few hours and just having a good time.
JOCELYN: We also met one of our Flip Your Life course participants who found out we were in the area and asked to meet us. That was pretty fun. It was not too creepy. Just kidding, Mark.
SHANE: Only because we knew him. We talked to him quite a bit.
JOCELYN: But we appreciated that. We were so glad that he reached out to us and we met him out in the lobby and just chatted for a couple of minutes. It’s just nice to be able to go out and meet people that they are part of our lives in our course and we really do get really involved with the people in our courses and we were just really appreciative to have met him and just had a good time doing that.
SHANE: Mark sent me a message on Facebook and said, “Hey, I live up here. Want to hang out?” I said, “Yeah, man. Come on over and we’ll drink a cup of coffee orhang outt or something in the lobby before we eat breakfast and we were like, “Yeah, but no business.” The first thing we do as soon as we see each other, “Hey let’s talk about online business.”
JOCELYN: Well, that’s the same thing that we do. Shane and I always say, “Okay, today we’re not going to talk about business,” and that’s pretty much…
SHANE: That’s pretty much all we talk about.
JOCELYN: That and our kids.
SHANE: That was a good time. So if you ever see us out and you know us, “Hey that’s Shane and Jocelyn,” don’t be afraid to come up to us and say hi. We’re normal people and we just like hanging out and helping people, and talking to people and meeting new people. It was just an awesome thing to be able to do that.
All right guys, that wraps up this episode. I hope you take those tips and take action on them to get more open rates. Open rates are the life blood of your business. You’ve got to get your message in front of people if you’re ever going to make sales. Social media is important. You talk to people, you interact with people, but your email list is the backbone of your business. That’s where most of your money is going to be generated so spend a lot of time and effort really thinking about how you can get that list built up and you can get more people opening your emails. If you would like to see how we operate our email list, just go to FlippedLifestyle.com and sign up for our email list and you can kind of look at that and copy what we do. You just click the orange button to the right that says, “Click here to learn more” and you can see how we use our email list to communicate with our subscribers.
Thanks for tuning in. You do not want to miss next week’s show. We’re actually going to break down exactly how to host and run your own webinar. There are a lot of courses and “experts” out there that tell you how to set a webinar up and show you how they use webinars. Some of those courses cost like $500 but you really don’t need them. We’re going to show you exactly how to set up a webinar, how to operate it, how to run it, and we’re going to do that free of charge on the podcast. So we’re going to have next week a tutorial on how webinars work and how you can use them to really make your business go to the next level and make more sales and we’re going to show you. If you don’t how to use a webinar, if you don’t know how to get one going, we’re going to go over that next week. It’s probably not as complicated as you think or some people make it out to be. Until then, we will catch you all on the flipside. See you later.
JOCELYN: See yah, bye.
SHANE: One more thing guys, if you would like immediate one-on-one help from Jocelyn and myself, all you have to do is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/TalkToUs, that’s all one word. You can check out our consulting services. We do not do a lot of consulting but we do block out a few hours a week where we can get on the phone, get on Skype, get on a Google Hangout, and talk to you about your online business where you can work personally with me and Jocelyn to help you go to the next level.
If you need any help, if you need one on one attention and you just can’t wait until maybe we select you for a Flipped Podcast, all you have to do is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/TalkToUs and you can check out when our schedule is available for you to get on a consulting call.
Arvind says
Wow. Excellent info. Very important and relevent information. I love the voting idea and segmenting. I think its also important to know the time zone of the subs on your email lists. I have a lot of international customers and have not taken the time to segment the list. Just great!
Joey says
I love the tip Shane shared, the voting and segmenting, although I’m still miles away from that stage.
I can see myself creating a free product (eBook or something) and starting to collect email addresses, but I just cannot see myself making money by selling a paid product, to be honest.
My aimed niche is Tumblr Tips and/or Dusk Photography Tips, but I can’t help but feel that I’m in a wrong niche. People may give me their email addresses to access free eBook, but hard to believe that people will pay for Tumblr Tips, for example.
How do you guys know when you are in a wrong niche? Any sign? Will be great if you can touch on this topic in your future episode. The sooner we realize it, the sooner we can stop wasting time and efforts, I guess.
Nathan says
Hey that’s a great tip about changing the flag in iTunes. I didn’t know I could do that.
I prefer to use CommentCast. It searches all the comments from all the countries, so I don’t have to click on each different flag in iTunes, wondering which country made a comment.
Cheers!
Steve young says
Hey Guys,
We just used your affiliate link to sign up for Aweber, but I saw this above after that. This offer for $1 per day is no longer valid and the link goes to a 404 page. Just wanted you to know.
Steve
Shane Sams says
Thanks Steve, we will check it 🙂
Liz FitzGerald says
Loving your podcasts! Question about asking questions and having links for people to click. Where will the link take them when they click on it? I’m used to putting links into my emails, but the link will take them to a page or product on my site. If I have links for questions, where will they go when they click?
Jocelyn Sams says
Hi Liz! I just send them to a thank you page that lets them know we received their response.