#41: 4 Easy Ways to Increase Email Clicks & Opens

Alison Smith: [0:17]

Howdy, listeners. We’re Alison.

 

Karin: [0:19]

And I’m Karin.

 

Alison Smith: [0:20]

And we love growing CPG brands.

 

Karin: [0:22]

We’re the founders of a digital and social media marketing agency, UMAI Marketing, and creators of the Consumer Goods Growth Course, where we’ve helped grow dozens of brands to six and seven figures.

 

Alison Smith: [0:33]

We’re former in-house marketers turned consumer goods marketing educators who’ve set off on a mission to provide CPG founders and marketers with actionable strategies that drive community and sales. We’re talking real results.

 

Karin: [0:46]

If you’re wanting to learn simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies needed to drive real brand growth without breaking the bank or sacrificing your social life, then this is the podcast for you. Let’s get into today’s episode.

 

Alison Smith: [0:59]

Email is such an important marketing tool for any brand. It’s a way for you to have direct access to someone via their inbox, which allows you to create a meaningful relationship with your leads. In today’s episode, we’ll cover four easy things you can do to increase your opens and click-throughs right now.

 

Hey, everyone. Alison here. Hope everyone is enjoying their spring wherever you are in the world. Here in Austin, Texas, we didn’t really get a true winter. We had an ice storm for about a week. The whole city shut down, but then it jumped straight into spring/a little bit of summer. It’s pretty hot out there, so hope everyone’s having a good transition into their springtime.

 

[1:49] So today, we’re going to cover four of our top tips to help you increase your open and click-through rates for email marketing. We are huge advocates of email marketing. A lot of people find it a bit snoozy, a bit boring, but it is truly the OG of marketing. It’s been around for a long time, and it worked back in the day and it works now. It’s one of our highest drivers of ROI. So let’s hop into these four easy things that you can start implementing for your email marking right now.

 

[2:23] Number one, send from a name versus your brand. For example, instead of sending from hello@umaimarketing, we send from alison@umaimarketing or Karin from UMAI Marketing as when a brand says an email, people are ingrained to think it’s going to be salesy or promotional or spammy when it’s just a brand name. So instead, choose a front-facing person on your team and use their name as your send from. It can be the founder, the CEO, it can be the marketing director. It can be even a made up name, really, if you need to do that. But choose a name, a front-facing person to send all your emails from so that your audience can actually picture this person and they can picture that this email is written and coming from a person as they read through.

 

In fact, 42% of people surveyed said that the first thing that they look at when deciding to open or just archive an email is the sender or the from name. So using a first name of a person is going to help you grab attention, and likely it’s going to get you more opens than just sending from your brand. And it also builds that know, like and trust that we always talk about, because it’s coming from a person versus this brand entity that people can’t really put a face to. So that’s tip number one. Send from a name versus your brand’s name. It’s going to be more personal, which equals more opens which equals more clicks which then equals more sales.

 

[4:06] Tip number two is your subject lines. So start optimizing and testing your subject lines. We love to use first name merge tags in our subject lines. So instead of saying, “Open this email to get 20% off,” it could say, “Hey Alison, get 20% off now.” Calling that person out, knowing their first name and calling them out, it increases open rates significantly. We’ve tested this over and over and over again, and it is a huge driver for opens.

 

The step that you have to take, though, to get that first name is when you have a popup on your website asking for people’s email address, also add the first name field. You can make it required or you can make it not required depending on what the conversion rate, if it messes with your conversion rate by making it a required field. But overall, we actually make it required. And throughout the marketing funnel, by having that name, even if it drops conversion rates slightly by having that first name, and merging that first name into things like subject lines and then all throughout email bodies, it really personalized the email. It really makes the user feel like they’re being spoken directly to. And overall, it’s going to help opens and sales and conversion rates overall.

 

[5:35] Okay, and number three, make your CTA button stand out with contrasting colors. A CTA button is your call to action. It’s the little button that you’ll see on websites, on emails. We abbreviated it to CTA. But you want to draw the reader’s attention to where you want them to click by using bolded text in that button. You can even increase the text size of that button, and definitely use a different, contrasting color than your email body background. So if you’re using a cream-colored background, use a bright orange or a bright green color for your button.

 

One thing I will say is there is a whole psychology about colors. I am not super well versed with that. Go ahead and get into a Google hole on it. It’s pretty interesting.

But we often stay away from red as our CTA button because red, for people, mean stop. So often, we’ll use colors like a bright green or a bright orange, things like that. And of course, follow your brand guidelines. Hopefully, you have some really contrasting bright colors that you can use in your emails.

 

Also, ensure that you have that CTA button above the fold. So above the fold means that the user, when they open the email on mobile or desktop, they don’t have to scroll to see a CTA button. It is right there. As soon as they open the email, it is right there staring them in the face. They can click. They are told exactly what they need to do. And this really helps increasing your click-through rate by having that above the fold, telling someone exactly what they need to do, what you want them to do before they have to scroll.

We also recommend using action-oriented text on your buttons, like save 20% now. Telling someone what to do is really the motive here. You really need to tell someone what you want them to do.

 

So if it’s going to the site to shop a promo, it’s generally like, “Take 20% off now. Save 20% off now.” Things like that. If it’s just shopping generally, you can use shop now, get the insert product now, things like that. You also want to keep it short and sweet. A long button doesn’t look nice. You want someone to be able to glance at it and be able to… for their brain to register it. So keep it as short as possible. And again, we like to test our first-person pronouns in our CTA button. So if you’ve done that step with your pop-up to grab your lead’s first name, you can merge their first name into your CTA and make it super personalized and make it like you’re speaking directly to them. So instead of saying, “Get started now,” your buttons would say, “Get started now, Alison,” which is really, really powerful.

 

Another thing with CTA buttons is you should use them to address concerns, meaning agitate or addressing the problem or pain point. Again here, so if you have a nice hook at the top of your email that is hitting a pain point, you can sum it up inside of your CTA. So for example, if you’re selling a special ready-to-drink beverage that addresses dehydration, your CTA could highlight that pain point again by saying something like, “Stay hydrated,” as the copy on the button.

 

And then finally, about CTA buttons. I could talk all day about CTA buttons, but finally you want to create urgency as well. So again, if there’s a promo or a limited-time deal or a product that might go out of stock, use copy that is highlighting that urgency. For example, something like, “Get it before it’s gone.”

 

[9;47] Okay, our fourth and final tip for increasing your opens and click-through rates is segmenting your list and only sending weekly broadcasts to your most engaged leads. So some background here. We recommend that brands send at least one broadcast a week to their list. That does not include all of the automated flows that are running behind the scenes that are indoctrinating, selling, doing all the things on autopilot. We recommend sending a fresh broadcast as well, where you’re updating about something that happened with your product that week, just general education and maybe you got into a new retailer. Those are great for broadcast topics. But only send those to top engaged leads.

 

So what you can do if you’re inside MailChimp or Klaviyo, instead of sending to the whole list, make an audience that is people who have engaged with an email in the last 60 to 90 days or have engaged with the last five to 10 emails, is generally the range that we use. It’s going to be a shorter time if you’re a larger brand with a lot more leads. You can extend the timeline, say people who’ve engaged in the last 90 days, if you’re a smaller brand and really need to capitalize on the leads that you do have. So again, only top engaged folks should get your weekly emails, and it’s important to create and keep that cadence.

 

So if you can’t commit to a weekly broadcast, then start with once a month. Once you feel comfortable getting in that groove, that cycle of once a month broadcast, bring it up to two a month. Once you get able to make that content wheel work for you, that’s when you can get to weekly. What we don’t want you to do is condition your leads to expect a weekly email from you and then all of a sudden, things get crazy. You’re going to expo. You don’t have time to write your weekly email, so it falls off. Because those audiences are conditioned, that’s going to be a bit of a shock to them and they’re going to think something’s gone awry with your business. So just be very real with yourself on what you’re able to do and keep that cadence.

 

And then finally, tying that back, that segmentation of engaged leads only for those weekly broadcasts, the reason is you don’t want to send weekly emails to unengaged users as that’s going to drive down your deliverability for everyone else. So say you are just sending your email to everyone on your list. Once it gets delivered and it bounces or people mark it as spam or people don’t open it, then your email client is going to start marking down your deliverability because they think that your emails aren’t good, people don’t like them. So it’s going to lower your deliverability score and it’s going to shoot you in the foot for the long term. So what you want to do is focus on engaged folks only and only send to them, and that’s going to help you increase your opens and click-through rates down the line.

 

[13:21] Okay, we hope you enjoyed these four top tips to get higher open rates and click-through rates with email marketing, and are able to start implementing them ASAP. We’ll see you back here for our next episode.

 

Karin: [13:33]

Thanks for listening to the UMAI Social Circle, y’all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. And while you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us a DM at umaimarketing on Instagram if you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.

 

Alison Smith: [13:52]

And don’t forget to access our free masterclass, where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umaimarketing.com/masterclass. And we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.