every email marketer dreams of high open rates so if you're looking to boost your email open rates in e-commerce you're in the right place today I will walk you through some actionable steps to make your email marketing campaign stand out and drive engagement if you're new here my name is Casey and I run L and Co agency my team and I help eight and nine figure e-commerce Brands maximize their revenue from email and SMS marketing over the years we've accumulated a ton of knowledge and experience in this field and our agency's emails tend to to outperform the average Benchmark in terms of open and click rates and conversion rates so you can trust me with the tips that I'm going to share and if you find this video helpful please give me a thumbs up subscribe to this Channel all of those things help me a huge great deal uh and they're free and please do that if it's not too much trouble I really really appreciate you and appreciate you being here okay let's go thing number one you want to do is if you want to improve your open rates just so we get the obvious out of the way is you need to optimize your subject lines yes subject lines play a huge role in your open rate obviously um so you do need to pay attention to your subject lines here's some of the things that you can do to get more of the people that you're sending emails to open those emails thing number one is talk like normal people when you try to be too marketing gee your subject line reads exactly like that like it was sent by a marketing company so don't capitalize every single word in your subject line because only marketing companies do that normal people don't capitalize every single word in the subject line another thing is just use human words and human language pretend that you're actually sending this email to a friend what would you say in your subject line what would you say in your preview text thing number two please keep it short um you don't actually have to count the number of characters in your subject trying to like find the the Silver Bullet there are a lot of studies that say oh like X number of characters in subject line leads to open rate that doesn't matter as long as it's not like this I do still see subject lines that are this long um as well as preview text so as long as it's something reasonable that's fine if it's more than six words it's probably unreasonable so uh six words or less uh sometimes much less thing number three is and this is probably the toughest part and that's why subject lines can be pretty tough uh is because it's not a science and it's more of an art is you need to mix in curiosity with something concrete and benefit driven so you have to either talk about the benefit that your email is about or hint at that benefit but at the same time make it curious um I know it sounds a little bit wishy-washy but like that's the Art and Science don't make it too like don't make your subject line too abstract and to um click bity because once a person opens the email and then the subject line and the content are not connected uh trust me yes people don't read and yes people receive too much stuff but people do notice this stuff and they will start associating your brand with clickbait inness and then they will open less and less so don't do that do have a curiosity but once the person opens the email they should feel the dopamine of understanding what making them feel curious about as if they saw the big question so this takes practice don't be discouraged if it doesn't come out right the first time and also you can't do this about all the emails but do try to do that so hint at the benefit uh but also have something concrete and then as a pro tip for you when we're talk about the subject lines is don't forget the preview text so the preview text is the second thing that shows up in the inbox when people see emails um and preview text is as important as your subject line so all the things we talked about when we talked about the subject line just now they also apply to the preview text and you know they work in tandem uh and they both affect yours open rate a ton so work with both thing number two for improving your open rate is segmenting your list I just recorded a video about segmentation right before this one so it's either already on the channel or it will come out next so uh we'll link it go on the screen and under the video in the description when it's ready make sure that you subscribe to my channel so that you don't miss the future videos but segmenting your list is the first or the second most it's probably the first most important factor that affects your open rate as well as your click rate and other engagement metrics because if you send to a super small very engaged audience your open rate will be way higher than if you send the same email with the same subject line but to a wider audience of people who are less engaged of course there is a trade-off if you send to tighter smaller segments will get better engagement but lower overall reach because you're not reaching as many people and if you're sending to a wider audience you're reaching more people even if your open rate is a little bit lower but you are compromising your engagement that's why segmentation is an art and Science and it's walking that line between performance and revenue and engagement both are important but sometimes you have to compromise one for the other in the moment but overall like over the course of a year and years with your brand you should be watching both because you cannot tank your engagement because you won't have Revenue then but then sometimes you also need to go for the revenue and compromise and engagement a little bit but not too much so segment your list you want better engagement send to a tighter segment the third thing that will impact your open rates in a big way is the send time let's talk about the flows first in all of your email automations uh you will have time delays in between emails what's important there is that you don't add a condition where an email is being sent at a particular time of the day instead let it be sent at the same time as when the flow was triggered so people trigger Flows at times when they are active so for example if they started a checkout and then didn't complete it and then you send your first email you know 4 hours later that second email should go out 20 hours hours after the first email so that 20 + 4 is 24 your second email is going out about 24 hours after the person first triggered this flow the Assumption here is that they were active at this time of the day yesterday when they triggered the flow so they should also be active at this time of the day today when you send them that second email what some brands do is they say hey send the second email one day later at 12:00 p.m. and that 12:00 p.m. is completely random based on your impressions or like your thoughts of how your audience performs and it's not based on how the person's actually behaving so in your automations avoid setting specific times send times and let the flow emails automation emails be sent at times that are consistent with when the flow was triggered so that's flows with campaigns when you're deciding on the send time if your email service provider has a feature that allows you to systematically and scientifically learn about the best time for open rates for your audience use that feature if you're using clavio which I love and if you you're not using clavio yet I will have a link to sign up for clavio in the description of this video if you're using clavio they have a wonderful feature that I love that is called smart s time and the way it works is that when you first start using it you have to use exploratory send time feature where your email will be sent to even groups of people over the course of 24 hours so it just like divides your audience randomly into chunks of 24 and then sends at each hour of the day and then you need to do that a number of times until the algorithm determines a statistically significant um best time for your audience and then you can see a graph and you can see oh on average if I send at 10: a.m. my open rate is 40% and if I send at 10 p.m my open rate is 55% and it's just very datadriven and based on reality versus again like your impressions of when an optimal sent time is for a lot of Brands we work with the optimal send time ends up being in late p.m. hours and all brands are like why are you guys sending emails at 11:00 p.m. and then we show them the numbers and we say hey look that's when your people are opening if you have access to that feature in your email platform use it if you don't have access to that feature I guess you will have to run a bunch of ab tests um for time based AB tests and determine your optimal send time that way I would say get outside of the box don't just send at 10:00 a.m. or 12:00 p.m. or whatever is like standard uh because you might see much much better open rates at uh less traditional sent times the fourth thing for improving your open rates is using personalization so you can use personalization in the subject line and the the preview text so you can use the first name or the name of the product category that the person was interested in and they have shown that interest by clicking an email in the past or viewing a category page or something like that so you can use all of that actually in the subject line and preview text or you can use that in the content of the email and then of course it doesn't affect the open rate as directly as if it were in the subject line however when you use personalization in the content of the email that has an effect of on whether the email lands in the primary inbox it doesn't guarantee anything but we have seen trend that if we personalize emails they have a higher chance of ending up in the primary tab as opposed to the promotions Tab and if that happens of course the open rate will be higher because like simply more people will see it in their inbox so personalization is great for conversion rate but it's also great for your open rate so do use it when it's appropriate but something that I will encourage you not to do is trying to stuff uh your email with personalization so if you use the person's first name in every subject line that's a little creepy and that will achieve the opposite of what you're trying to achieve so be sensible um but do use personalization the next thing that you should be doing when you're crafting your emails is trying to avoid spam traps and spam filters there are a few things that are more likely to trigger spam filters and I have a whole separate video just about that so definitely go watch it we'll link it on the screen right now um if you use excess capitalization if you're just way too excited in your subject lines and you have a lot of uh exclamation points if you overuse words like sale or free or anything that sounds too spammy it will trigger spam filters so just watch out for that and again go watch that video for a much more in-depth uh tutorial on how to do that next you need to keep your email list fresh that means that you need to go and clean your list very regularly um I have a video coming up about that on this channel too so subscribe if you still haven't subscribed if you watch still this uh till this moment you haven't do subscribe um the point of this is that inevitably over time your list will become older and filled with profiles that have subscribed a long time ago um and I think email service providers recommend that you clean every 3 months we usually clean every 6 months um so anywhere in that time frame is good but you should have a sunset flow it works all the time and as people become unengaged that flow attempts to re-engage those profiles and if they're still unengaged then they get tagged and then you have to go in and manually suppress those people or maybe your email service provider does that automatically but you do need to set up infrastructure for that this has an effect on your overall account health and your deliverability but also on your open rates because if you're sending to unengaged people your open rate will be lower your click rate will be lower so keeping your list and segments fresh and clean uh will keep your open rates higher up and then the last thing that I think a lot of Brands Overlook when they are working on their open rates and that's because you're going for a fast win and this strategy is a longterm Marathon type of strategy is watch your reputation and I don't mean your deliverability or like your email reputation but your Brand's reputation if you send junk people will expect to see junk from you and they will stop opening your emails if you send emails that Delight that make people laugh that provide useful information that don't annoy um continuously uh then people will remember that um and they will actually look forward to receiving an email from your brand that's very rare for you know for consumer brands for brands in general for businesses nobody's looking forward to receiving a marketing email except when they do there are those Brands you probably know Brands like that who you truly like you truly love their sense of humor or you just love their aesthetic and they just look very beautiful to you and you look forward to those emails so be a brand like that it's tough because it's just continuous work and that means putting intention into every single email that you send but it does pay off and that is what's truly going to keep your email open rates high like even if you screw up a subject line here and there even if you're ascending to a less engaged segment but you've been building their reputation over time it will pay off so do that I hope that you enjoyed this video if I missed something big that we should have talked about when we talked about open raids definitely let me know in the comments I read everything I try to respond to everybody as well also comment under this video in the comments and let me know what would you like to learn next about um I'm constantly looking for topics for these videos so if you have an idea to throw in definitely go ahead and throw it in other than that thank you so much for watching until the end I will see you in the next video thanks