Engagement Matters: Boosting Opens, Clicks, & Replies on Your Emails - Anna Crosby

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00:00 This is how to boost your engagement on your emails. My name is Anna Crosby you might have seen me around. I'm an email marketing strategist for online business owners. I help you write emails that get you paid. And I am a tech nerd i love using technology. I mean, my current lifestyle would not be possible without it so I do actually really love it and I love learning how to use it.  

00:25 And especially with email, marketing there's a lot of tech stuff sometimes. So I love learning about that as well. However, what I do not love learning about is social media i am a very social media avoiding person. I don't use it for my business and I don't use it for my personal life. Everything that I've ever done in my business has been through email so that's why I love to teach it. I am very, very introverted. And there's a fun fact, I have a PHD in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.  

00:57 So this intersection of sales psychology and email marketing is just like the perfect fit for me. What we're going to be talking about is we're going to be talking about the changes in the email rules and spoiler alert, they're not really changes, they're just things that have always been a best practice are now required to do. We're going to talk about what exactly constitutes engagement. There's positive engagement and there's negative engagement so we're going to talk about the difference between the two and talk about which one that you want. And then I'm going to give you some tips on getting more opens, clicks and replies. And we're going to be talking about managing engagement very briefly at the end when we recap everything so let's start off here with the changes in the email rules they're not really changes.  

01:49 They're not anything new. Email marketing authentication like your domain authentication that all of us have had to do, That has always been a thing now it is required. So authenticating your domain, keeping your spam complaint low so what these changes really mean is that now your deliverability of your email so whether your email gets into somebody 's inbox versus the spam folder or just gets blocked automatically, it's really up to you. You used to be able to borrow your email service provider 's reputation. Nowadays that is no longer true because every single platform requires you to use your own domains authentication.  

02:33 So that is really the bigger thing. But the other things is that you have to obviously keep your spam complaint low, under 0 3 % of your engaged contacts so out of the people who open your email and are reading it, if more than 3 % of them complain, then your emails will be blocked, not sent to spam. Not you know, sent somewhere else they will just be completely blocked. So they're really cracking down on the spam. And I'm not saying that every anybody here, I'm sure everybody here is definitely not trying to spam people. But we need to be aware of what they are looking for in terms of what actual spammers do to make sure that we don't do that so our business emails don't fall into their spam signals.  

03:24 So one of these is sending large amounts of emails to people who do not read them. This is probably the biggest spam indicator and it really affects us as business owners because we want to be growing our list, We want to be constantly adding people to our email list. But that is no longer enough just because you have an email list of five thousand people. If 4000 people don't ever read your email, you actually effectively only have a list of a thousand people so all of the statistics that you hear about with how many sales you can make with your email, list those are for your engaged people and not the total number of people on your list.  

04:10 The other thing is that if you are constantly sending emails to large amounts of people and none of them read the emails, they don't open them, they don't click them, they don't engage with them, then that means that Google and Yahoo are going to look at your domain and start to think that you might be one of these spammers that they are trying to keep out of people's inboxes and we definitely do not want to do that because we can't just move to another platform that has a better deliverability because remember now our deliverability is up to us to control and to keep safe.  

04:47 So in that way, anybody who is unengaged on your email list will eventually become a liability for you and for your business. So I'm not saying this to scare you i am saying this so we can all be aware of what the best practices are to keep our lists engaged. So we do not set off any of this, these spammer traps. What actually is the engagement that Google and Yahoo are really paying attention to so you can get positive engagement from your people? Things like opening your emails, scrolling all the way down to the end of the email. Google monitors this and they've basically said that they do.  

05:31 So somebody who only opens the email, reads the first few lines, and then closes out the email is not considered as engaged as somebody who actually scrolls down and reads the entire email. Things like clicking a link in the email responding to the email, hitting reply or forwarding the email to somebody else dragging the email from the Promotions tab to their primary tab or their primary inbox, and in marking the email as not spam sometimes this refers to whitelisting a contact, creating a filter to make sure that it doesn't ever go to spam, or rescuing it from the spam folder.  

06:13 So these are all examples of good engagement that signals to the email providers that emails from this domain are important to the person receiving them. However, there is also negative engagement so these are things that people do so they are engaging with their emails, but they are doing it in a way that is not beneficial to you and actually can harm your sender reputation. So things like marking your email as spam, there is a lot of people are a lot of people who still do not understand how to manage commercial email that they get from businesses.  

06:55 Sometimes they don't realize that they can unsubscribe or they do not believe that clicking the unsubscribe link will actually unsubscribe them from their list. This is from years and years of companies, you know, doing basically bad stuff with their email. People have clicked unsubscribe and they keep sending them emails. Negative engagement is people just deleting your email without opening or leaving it in the spam folder even if they read it so basically you obviously want more positive engagement. You don't want this negative engagement so that your emails can be delivered to those who do want to hear from you because Google obviously knows what your domain is. It's looking at what all of the users who are using Gmail doing when they get an email from your domain.  

07:49 So when when a lot of people mark your email as spam or do a lot of these negative engagement behaviors, people who are actually wanting to get your emails and are opening them, reading them, clicking them, etcetera, might start not getting them or getting them into the spam folder so let's go ahead and talk about getting more opens, getting more clicks and getting more replies, getting more opens.  

08:14 The nobody opens your email, none of the other stuff that we're going to talk about is actually going to matter so they have to open the email first before they can do anything with it. And the thing that gets people to open is subject lines and preview text. Subject lines, obviously, I'm sure everybody here knows that they need to be really good, they need to be enticing. But the other thing that I don't hear a lot of people talk about is the preview text it needs to make people curious and entice to open the email as well.  

08:47 A lot of people still skip it if you do not put preview text, they will put the first line of your email body in there. And sometimes you might not want to do that though. My best advice for subject lines is to experiment with different subject line formula so if you Google subject line formulas, you're going to find a lot of articles talking about different ways that you can combine things based on what kinds of email you are writing. But the other lesser known ways that I really like is looking at the email at the, emails that I get in my own inbox and scanning them and paying attention to the ones that I want to open first.  

09:29 What do I want to open immediately what what is it about that subject line that made me want to open it? Because chances are there is a specific formula that they use and you can try replicating it with your own email. The other thing that I would do is I would challenge you to write at least three to five different subject lines for every email that you write and then look at them and then ask yourself which one is the best one. Let's talk about getting more clicks. Getting clicks is my favorite topic to talk about because of more clicks equal more sales. It means that people are going to be clicking to your sales page, that are going to be clicking to your offers, they're going to be clicking to your shop whatever it is that you are selling, it's going to be a link and you generally want people to click it.  

10:20 However, just having a link in an email does not mean that people are automatically going to click it, and the biggest thing is to make sure that you're really explaining why somebody should click on your link. Best practices for links in your email Every link needs to be on its own line and not crowded inside of a paragraph. If at all possible, make it make your links in a different color than the rest of the text in the email. Traditionally links are blue, but I really like branded color links and that's what I use for my my emails my email links are orange.  

11:02 That makes your email stand out in the inbox just a little bit more because your links are not the same color as they see all over the rest of the Internet. Make sure that your link looks like a link so make sure it's underlined. Make sure that your link contains a call to action so don't say this is the link to the sales page and it's like, OK, all right, like I understand this is the link to the sales page. Instead, try making them do something right, like click here to buy right or click here to get on the wait list make sure that you are telling them to click the link, not just like, hey, here's a link, but actually click the link.  

11:46 But make sure you do have language in there that actually tells them what they need to do with the link, not just the link is there. Make sure that your link is not hidden by an image. A lot of people like to use images as links i've gotten some of these emails. It's mildly frustrating because I don't get images loaded by default. So they'll be talking about something and then there'll be a space and I know that there's an image there, but then it just continues on talking about clicking the link.  

12:14 But the link is actually the image that I cannot see by default. So make sure it's not hidden by the image. If you really want to use an image for a link, you can make your image with a link and then under the image you can do a caption with your link and a call to action to click on that link. Another best practice that I feel like it's a little counterintuitive the first few times that you do it, but you need to repeat your link at least two to four times in the email.  

12:44 3 is the sweet spot, but if you even repeat it twice, once in the beginning or middle of the email and once at the bottom, that is already increasing the chances that somebody is going to click the link. Sometimes people will be reading the email and they would want a little bit more information about what they're going to see when they click the link. So they'll continue reading the email and then the If there's not an A link for them to click when they are done, they might forget about it and move on so the more links that you have in your email, the more you are increasing your chances to to get people to click and actually see your sales page.  

13:28 However, there's always a however, right with all of these things, don't overwhelm people with links the rule of thumb is 1 link per email so this is what I I guess I should have written one link direction per email. So if you are sending them to your sales page, all of the links inside of this one email should be sending them to the same sales page. Don't send them to check out your other bundles don't check out. Don't send them to read your about page don't send them to your blog post.  

14:02 Keep it 1 email one link direction. Focus them on giving them one thing to decide to do instead of asking them to choose to make a decision about which one of these links they are going to click. I know that we talked about we want to be getting engagement and getting people to click so you might think, well, if I just give them a menu of things to choose from, they will surely click one of them. However, if you are really trying to get them to go to your sales page, especially, especially with sales emails, this is so, so important.  

14:37 You want to really direct their attention to the one thing that you want them to be doing. You don't want them to spend their energy trying to decide what they want to do instead and finally, some of the really best conversations that I've had with people in my community have been from them replying to my email and then just been keeping in touch. Replies are literal gold for your business. You're not only are you going to get more insight into your customers mind, you can start conversations that will turn into sales. And also if you have these conversations back and forth and it feels like you're not shouting into the void, we don't want to be shouting into the void.  

15:19 We want to be knowing that somebody out there is reading and getting value from our emails and getting replies will confirm that so I would definitely encourage you to think of ways that you can get replies to keep in mind that replying to your email takes actual effort for your subscribers. So this makes this type of engagement getting replies really valuable but also really, really rare. So here are some best practices for when you are asking people to reply.  

15:52 When you ask for a reply, make sure that your question is specific. Don't make them think about what you're actually asking right? Don't make them go look something up or think more than about a minute about their answers so if you want to start practicing getting replies getting, yes or no answers is a great start. So and after they reply with a yes or a no, then you can ask them follow up questions and really can keep this conversation going.  

16:25 Make your question very easy to answer. So if you can give them options for what they can answer. One of my most successful emails that I've sent to get engagement from and get replies actually had four options and my subject line was ABC or D and I wanted them to. I pre wrote some answers that they might have an ABC or D and I asked them just respond with the letter that corresponds to the one that is true for you. I think I got over 20 replies to just that one email in the first day alone i got more as the week went on, which is really, really amazing because I got a lot of data and I got a lot of great conversations that came out from just that one email.  

17:16 Remember also, when you were in school and you had a test or an exam, the multiple choice questions were always easier than the essay ones, right? So you wanna make sure that it's easy for your people to answer your question as well by giving them a multiple choice option to get them started. Obviously, as as with the link clicks, you want to make it apparent what's in it for them. Why should they bother using some of their valuable time when they have thousands of emails in their inbox they're trying to get through all of them they're trying to make sure that they didn't miss anything.  

17:55 Why should they take those two to three minutes to draft a reply to you? Let them know that you will respond with some personalized advice just for them. You'll you might send them a valuable resource and exchange. This works really well if you have multiple freebies and your audience does not have all of them you can use some of your freebies as incentives for some of these things.  

18:19 Let them know they'll get a coupon code or a discount code i would be sparing with this one because you don't want to get into the you don't want your people to be expecting discount codes every time that they send you an email right? Or they might be entered to win something cool so your incentive needs to be proportional to how badly you want to get a response. So for my email that I gave them four options with ABC or DI also told them that when they responded, I would send them something that will help them make more sales with their emails and it was a resource that I created specifically for the promotion that I was running at that time.  

18:55 But think about what your people would want and offer it to them. You know, give it to them in exchange for replying to you and engaging with you. So what do we do with all of this information right? I really want you to keep engagement top of mind. Whenever you draft any email for any reason to your email, list consider how you're going to get that engagement obviously opens you want to make sure that they open. Definitely do not skip the subject line brainstorming eventually, as you get practice with subject lines, you kind of know what works. You're going to have your own collection of formulas that you can use, but it's still a very good practice to workshop and test subject lines because you never know what your people are going to respond to the most.  

19:45 Even if you are writing an update email, Chuck a link in there, a couple of links just to to have some kind of engagement going on with your email so consider how can you make it a two way conversation? How can you make it not just like a news blast and people are not going to, you don't have anything to do with it think about how you're going to engage your emails or engage your people even when it's not a sales email so. If you're, if you're wanting to reply, there's always have something for them to do at that point, right? Always have something for them to click on or something for them to think about and reply back to you with their thoughts.  

20:29 Something like that give them plenty of reasons to click on a link. Try to reframe clicking on the link not as going to a sales stage, but getting more information and getting, you know, answering a survey as as getting an incentive and obviously open up a two way conversation by incentivizing reply. This is the last thing that I.  

20:58 Want to talk about is your welcome sequence. Your welcome sequence is super, super important in getting that engagement ASAP. You don't want people to be going through your email sequence or your welcome sequence and not engaging with any of those emails since they are a new subscriber. That is actually super, super important for your reputation so make sure that you're welcome sequence does a good job of getting engaged. So an action step for everybody listening right now is to make to go through your welcome sequence and make sure there's links for them to click. There's spots where you're incentivizing them to reply.  

21:38 There's reframes about clicking links to really hone in on what is in it for them to engage, right and make sure that you're welcome sequence has plenty of these opportunities and the last thing that I want to be talking about is managing an activity. So first of all, when we talked about welcome sequence engagement in the 1st 30 days from when they first joined your email list is crucial. You want to aim to get both opens and clicks in your welcome sequence we talked about that if somebody is not engaging with your welcome sequence, you do not need to be keep emailing those finished.  

22:19 Otherwise they become those unengaged subscribers and they will actually become a liability to your reputation and to your deliverability. And we do not want this. So 30 days is kind of like the very, I would say very popular benchmark for engagement so if they have engaged with your emails in the past 30 days, these are the people that you need to email most often so if you email more often than once a week, I would even say if you email like a weekly newsletter and that's all you do, you want to make sure that you're emailing those people all of your emails.  

23:02 If they have not engaged in the past 30 days, but they have engaged in the last 60 days, they're still OK you can potentially get them back, but you might consider running a re engagement campaign to get them back in to see if they're still interested to see if they will engage with your email and then if somebody has not been active at all in the past 90 days plus, you'll definitely need to stop sending regular emails. They are already a liability and you can just send them a one time email saying that you're going to unsubscribe them from the list and then you release them.  

23:40 Ok, so if this session gave you a bunch of aha moments about subject lines, clicks and writing better emails, that's honestly amazing and that was my goal for this talk. But real talk, this is just the beginning. If you want to have more engagement, more sales, more people actually reading your emails and taking some action, then you need more than just these quick tips. You honestly probably need just a better strategy to bake engagement into your emails. So that's where why I created this free email series called Open Click and Connect.  

24:19 I called it the Anti Broadcast series because inside the series, I'll teach you how to shift away from just sending newsletters to writing emails that build actual, real connection. The kind that gives you replies, gives you great conversations in the inbox, more clicks over to your sales pages and actually more sales. We're going to talk about a bunch of stuff like improving your deliverability, cleaning your list, how to manage engagement on an ongoing in an ongoing way, and how to actually design your email strategy with engagement built in. Most of all, I want you guys to have a list that's responsive, not just full of subscribers. So go ahead and click the link below this presentation there should be a link to click this, or you can just go to gni collective dot com slash engage dash series.  

25:14 All right, this is where you're going to sign up for this email series. There's no like training, no PDFs. It's just 5 short, to the point emails that are going to show you exactly how you can start building the trust, visibility and momentum that you want for maximum engagement. So go ahead and click that link, sign up and I will see you in your inbox.