The Secret To High Email Open Rates
When I first understood this and ‘it clicked’ this insight was a revelation.
I enjoy high open rates.
I’ve been working on it for years, to figure out how to get people to click, and to open.
There are 2 components to good open rates:
Get them to click
Don’t be so sensational that they feel tricked, and therefore feel their time has been wasted, and therefore are less likely to open your email next time your name appears in their inbox
Special Note: I’m not counting my Substack open rate which is much higher. Substack readers are much more invested in opening our mail. The following number are from my regular email list on a different provider that I’ve built over years. So the info in this post will be even more useful when you apply it on this platform because all other email platforms are like someones turned the difficulty setting all the way up to hard.
While the industry average sits between 25-28% mine hovers around 44% and rarely dips below 39% (often as high as 53%).
How?
Am I just that good? Perhaps. Maybe it’s because someone once shared the secret I’m about to share with you.
The secret is…
There is a difference between a headline and a subject line.
See, these might feel the same, but there are not.
When I first understood this and ‘it clicked’ this insight was a revelation.
Headlines for stories, chapters, and articles are often clever, vague, or require a certain amount of inside information to be interpreted by the reader. Often, people have more context because they can see more of the page. Often the headline is accompanied by an image, also giving context. Then we have headlines for landing pages; these are usually hyper-direct, to the point — or conversely, are long sentences structured to (a) call out the audience (b) call out the pain point (c) specify the promise.
Subject lines for email are a different beast altogether. All it needs to do is pique curiosity — that’s it. Provided you deliver a good feeling once they open your mail, you’re in the clear and have put a penny into their do-I-trust-this-person account.
When you create a headline, you’re creating a piece of copy to do the job of a headline.
When you create a subject line, you’re creating a snippet to get someone to click.
Two different tasks.
Now, here’s the interesting part. when you get really good at it, you can sometimes get the planets to align and combine the two. And that’s why I’m sharing this training with you, because…
It gets tricky here on Substack because our headlines become the subject lines.
So the pressure is on to be good — damn good.
Over the years I’ve developed a simple method that trained my brain to separate the two. So when I sit down to write, I'm not trying any harder. But the result is better.
I’ve detailed it in this video training
Headlines Vs Subject Lines: Know the key difference between the two and hook your audience no matter what the topic (20 mins).
By simply watching it you’ll absorb the information that will change how you write, making it faster to get to options you deem worthy.
Better than sitting through whatever TV your significant other is watching.
To reward my paid subscribers the second half of this post is just for them. Consider upgrading now to keep reading, among the other sweet benefits.