The Reason Your Subscribers Aren’t Opening Your Emails

If you ever get the chance to dig through some eCom brands’ email marketing backends, you’ll most likely notice the same thing I did: their engagement is terrible.

Their open rates are constantly dropping month over month, and only get propped up through extreme clickbait-y subject lines like “🚨WHOLE STORE 50% OFF🚨” and “LAST CALL FOR FREE XYZ ⏰🔥”

Subject lines like these fill up everybody’s inbox. They probably fill up yours, and they definitely fill up mine. And that’s because the only way brands can get their lists to open their emails is by using these over-the-top subject lines.

But why? Why is it so difficult to get your audience to engage with your emails?

The truth is, It’s not.

It just seems that way because the only emails you’re sending are 100% “urgent” sales pitches. There’s nothing “in it” for the customer. Your email marketing survives on impulse purchases that come from constant clearance sales. Not good.

This is not where you want to be as a brand. You’ll be constantly churning through subscribers and never building an audience that really loves your brand and your product.

You don’t want every email to be hard-selling some sale that’s “ending soon.” Customers see right through this BS.

If this sounds like your brand, stop doing this now. You’ll thank me in a month, I can promise you that.

But what should you be sending instead?

Valuable content that the reader would actually be interested in reading.

Valuable content can be informational, educational, funny, or just entertaining. Whatever it is, most of your emails should be worth reading.

Share relevant news or stories that are happening in your niche. Share “How-to” lists. There’s a million things you can do.

Just please don’t send 25% off sales 3 times a week anymore.

How To Create The Perfect Welcome Series

One note right off the bat: this welcome series is going to be created with the pop-up strategy I wrote about last week in mind. So the people who receive this welcome Series have never purchased and they just signed up to your list through your pop-up.

Ok now that we’re all on the same page… let’s go!

What makes for a perfect Welcome Series?

Let’s start with the high-level strategy. These people have never purchased before or been on a list of ours. They’re brand new, and they’re clearly interested in purchasing since they signed up on our pop-up, which for this example, we’ll say was offering 10% off.

With all this in mind, here is our primary goal: get them to purchase. That’s what we care about first and foremost.

The secondary goals we have are to: indoctrinate them into the brand, tell our story, and basically make them fall in love with us and what we’re all about. But none of this matters if they don’t purchase.

Now we understand what the purpose of the flow is and what we want to get out of it.

Now let’s break it down email-by-email.

And it’s important to remember that these emails are going to be brand-specific. Some brands have more stories to share than others as it pertains to how the brand got started, the causes you support, and other pertinent information like that.

Email #1: The only thing we want to do in this email is thank the reader for joining the family, welcome them briefly, then push the coupon code with urgency. Their offer, 10% off in this case, and the code they need to use should be the most visible part of the email by a mile.

There should not be a lot of copy or information of any kind. Just give them their code, tell them they only have a limited time to use it, and then tell them to go buy with a strong and obvious CTA.

If you keep this email simple and don’t overload it with too much information, it will convert like crazy.

Email #2: This email is simply reminding them that their code hasn’t been used, and you don’t want them to forget about their Welcome Coupon. You can look at this email similarly to how you’d send the first email in an abandoned cart flow. You’re just reminding them that they have the code, and that they need to use it.

The same principles apply in this email as #1, we don’t want to tell our story of how we got started or anything like that. Just focus on the code, and getting them to buy. Use urgency.

Pretty simple. 

Emails #3+: This is where we start sharing some brand stories, letters from the CEO/founder, or any kind of information that would endear a potential customer to your brand.

These types of emails are obviously very specific to each brand, so I can’t really tell you what to write, but what I can say is it’s important to not put too much copy in these emails. Yes, you want to share the whole story/message with them, but if the email is too long, no one is going to read it all.

It’s much better to spread out the story/message over a couple emails if required. And that’s not a bad thing at all. 

The principles of these emails are very straightforward. We want to start and end each email reminding the reader that their coupon still hasn’t been used, and that they should go use it right now.

How many emails you want to include for the rest of this flow is completely up to you. But the 3 topics that every brand should talk about are:

• How you got started. The story of the founders.

• The causes your brand supports. Does a % of the profits go to a good cause? Share this!

• What makes your brand/products stand out over all the rest. What’s your competitive advantage? Why should these people buy from you?

You can answer these questions in as little as 3 emails, or you can stretch it out to a dozen if you really want to. Completely up to you, as long as people are reading and engaging with them, send as many as you like.

Just remember, always start and end with the coupon, and give them an urgent reason to buy now.

If you do that, and follow everything else outlined in this strategy, your pop-up and welcome series “funnel” will be incredibly profitable.

One Strategy Change That Can Get You Out of the Promotions Tab and Into the Inbox

95% of eCom brands have all of their emails sent to the Promotions tab, or even worse, the spam folder.

It’s very, very rare to see an eCommerce company getting all their emails sent into Gmail’s inbox.

There are dozens of possible reasons for this, and I’d be lying if I told you I knew exactly what Gmail looks for when they determine where to send your email.

But at the same time, while I don’t know exactly what Gmail is looking for, I do know how to get into the inbox. It takes time, patience, consistent new traffic coming through your website, and interesting emails to send.

If you have those 4 things, you can get into the inbox. Now it’ll take more work to stay there, but that’s a different conversation for a different day.

For now, let’s talk about getting there in the first place!

So I’m sharing with you my personal strategy that you can implement today to start getting in the inbox. Here we go.

Ok.. so the first step is to obviously put your emails through any of the dozen email spam test softwares out there. You need to know the current state of your sender reputation.

Surprise, surprise, your emails are going to the promotions tab for Gmail. And maybe even spam for a couple other ESPs. This is normal. Not good, mind you. But normal.

What to do now? The very first thing you should do is use an app like JustUno or Privy to create a pop-up that will collect the email addresses and first names (important!) of new visitors on your site.

On the pop-up you need to offer something valuable. Something that a new visitor would actually be interested in. NOT $5 off orders of $100 or more. (Yes, I’ve seen that before). So for the sake of the example, let’s say it’s a BOGO offer.

Now this next part is important. You DON’T want to give them the code to redeem the BOGO offer on the thank you message after they enter their information.

Instead, after they click the button to get their BOGO code, you want to say something along the lines of “Thank You, we just sent you an email to confirm your email address, once you’re confirmed, you’ll receive your code.”

Now, in case you don’t know how to set up a confirmation email, just google it. It’s very simple. And make sure you edit the email a little bit so it looks decent.

Now you’re probably wondering, “Why do I want to make my prospective customers jump through all these hoops to get the BOGO offer? Won’t this hurt conversions?” A little bit. But we’re in it for the long haul.

Having dozens of people click “Confirm my subscription” in an email from you every day is a massive boost to sender reputation.

It’s very difficult to go to spam when that’s occurring because it’s just a huge message to Google that people want to get our emails, which will get us into the inbox eventually.

And we can sacrifice a few immediate conversions if it means we’ll get a 33% increase in open rate 60 days from now. Besides, it doesn’t hurt conversion rate nearly as much as you might think. I’ve tested it rigorously.

So once all that’s set up and live on your site, the pop-up should be converting at least at 6%, but preferably 8% or over.

Okay great. So someone sees your pop-up, they want the BOGO offer, they fill it out and get the message to go confirm their email. They confirm their email. What now?

Now you need to have a welcome series set up that provides the customer with the code. So the second they click the “Confirm” button, Klaviyo sends them your Welcome email that provides them with their BOGO code and a strong CTA to go purchase.

And that’s it.

The final journey of a new customer looks like this: See pop-up --> enter information --> see message to go confirm email --> confirm email --> see welcome series email with BOGO code --> Click through and buy.

Works beautifully.

Just changing your pop-up and Welcome Series strategy to this will be a very strong start to getting into the inbox.

And life is good when you’re in the inbox.

I’ll share another tip on how to get into the inbox next week, so look out for that!