If you want to increase email open rates to get above 40%, then you need this video. Why?
Well, if you can increase the number of people who open your emails, you can increase your sales. And who doesn’t want that?
Today, I’m going to show you two things.
- Why keeping your email list clean can actually increase your sales
- And how to keep it clean regularly, using Convertkit (affiliate link).
What you need to know to increase email open rates
Before we jump into how to increase email open rates, I’ve got to make sure you understand something about what affects your email open rates.
Open rates are affected by lots of things and there are some things that we simply don’t have control over.
One of the things that affects email open rates is our deliverability rate, and that’s something that a lot of people don’t know about or don’t think about.
So what is a deliverability rate?
Well, that’s the percentage of the emails that you send that actually end up in someone’s email inbox. I’m not talking about spam emails. That’s something entirely different. Sometimes your emails are completely blocked. Not only do they not end up in the person’s inbox, they don’t even end up in spam. That’s your deliverability rate.
Your email open rates directly affect your deliverability rate.
There are many other things that affect it as well, such as:
- using lots of spammy words
- having lots of images in your email.
Your open rate is one of the things that affects your deliverability rate. So, if we can increase email open rates, we will automatically increase your deliverability rate.
3 Ways You Can Use Tech Tools to Increase Your Sales
Tip #1 – Clean Your Email List With Convertkit
Cleaning your email list can feel so. dang. scary.
Cleaning your email list is when you remove people from your email list, people who signed up to be there. You’re going to remove them so that you can no longer email them again.
It’s hard. And it takes courage.
But it matters.
Doing so will increase email open rates, which will in turn increase your deliverability rates. Sometimes people ask me, “Misty, why do you recommend cleaning my email list? I’m just going to keep sending emails to people and maybe in two years, or so, they’re going to decide that they want to purchase.”
Well, that could happen. But what’s more likely to happen is that, in the meantime less and less and less of your subscribers are even getting your emails into their inbox. The negatives here outweigh the perks.
I am going to use Convertkit (affiliate) for this, but the principles I teach you will be the same even though the tech might be slightly different. You will, however, find this tutorial most helpful if you use Convertkit. It’s the number one email tool that I recommend, for two main reasons:
- It has a very good balance of ease of use and features. Sometimes you’ll find a tool that has so many amazing, crazy features, but it’s really hard to use. On the flip side, sometimes you’ll find a tool that makes your emails beautiful and pretty and wonderful, but doesn’t really have a lot of marketing automation features, which is what really matters if you want to use that tool to make passive income. Convertkit has a really good balance there – Not too hard to use, but you can do a lot with email marketing automation.
- They prioritize deliverability. Your email deliverability has to do both with what you do and with what all the people who use the same tool as you do. So if you pick a tool that a lot of spammers use, your email deliverability will be affected and you won’t be able to do anything about it. Convertkit will ban people from their email platform if they are too spammy. That’s the second reason why I like them.
How to use Convertkit to clean your email list
I am inside one of my client’s Convertkit account. The very first step is to copy the Cold Subscriber Re-engagement automation into your Convertkit account.
You’re going to click on the ‘use this automation’ button. It’s going to ask you to either sign up or log in.
You will need a Creator account in order to use this automation. There are limited things you can do with the Convertkit free account, but if you want to do automated email sequence and automation builders, you’ll need this Creator account.
I am going to log-in to my client Melanie’s account and I’m going to go back to the automation and choose ‘use this automation.’ It’ll say ‘copying the automation.’ It can take a few minutes.
This has added the workflow, which is the automation. It also added a sequence, which is the email that will be sent. And it is also added some tags.
I’m going to walk you through how this automation here works. It’s called Cold Subscriber Re-engagement. It is triggered, or it will start all the automatic stuff will start happening, when someone gets this tag added to their profile. You can tell this as a tag because it has a little tag with the plus button. So that means we’re adding the tag, not removing it.
Once someone gets that tag, all of this other automatic stuff is going to start happening.
The first thing that happens is that they are sent a sequence, the cold subscriber re-engagement sequence. They will immediately be added to this sequence which is a sequence of emails that will be sent to the people who get this tag.
The next step is to wait one week after this sequence has completed, or finished being sent.
We wait a week and then we add another tag. One is red and one is green because this is something that is happening inside the automation. It is a starting point inside the automation. So we add the ‘cold subscriber delete tag.’
Then you’ll see that there are some additional steps underneath that are red. These are places that people can jump to in the automation. Once somebody has the cold subscriber delete tag added to them, they’re going to jump down here. Once some, somebody has the reactivated do not delete tag added, they’re going to jump down here.
Inside of this automation, people are going to be given the opportunity to click on a link that will automatically add one of these two tags. That’s what I mean by jump, it means they’ll jump over the one week break and jump down to one of these two places. If they never click on it, then we wait the week and then we automatically add that cold subscriber tag for them.
Once somebody has the cold subscriber tag added, we remove the tag that’s cold subscriber re-engagement and then we unsubscribe them from your list.
Once somebody clicks on the one that says, “No, I really want to stay on your list” and they get the reactivated the do not delete tag, they’re going to jump to here and we’re going to remove the cold subscriber re-engagement tag and that’s the end of the automation. These people will stay on your list.
While Convertkit gave us a wonderful starting point here, there are a few things that we need to make happen inside of your profile.
Tip #2 – Create a Page On Your WordPress Website
In order to make these links work, you need to have a page on your website. I’m going to show you two ways to do this: one inside of a WordPress website and another inside of Canva (affiliate link).
First, I am going to log in to Melanie’s WordPress website.
I’m going to go to Pages -> Add New. I’m going to do it inside of Elementor (affiliate link) because that’s what I use regularly. So I just choose Edit with Elementor. If you use WordPress and you don’t use Elementor, I’m sure you can create a very similar page.
I’m simply going to drag in an inner section, two columns and then a heading in the left column. The heading is going to say something simple like, “Thanks! You will continue to receive my emails.” And in the right column, I am going to drop in a friendly picture of Melanie. Then I’ll make sure this is vertical aligned in the middle. And that’s it.
I’m gonna exit, go back to Pages. You can create a new one from scratch, or just duplicate the one you just created and change the text a little bit, which is what I’m going to do here. So I’m going to start by date. So I just pull the one, I just created up to the top. And I forgot to give it a title. I’m just going to put Email Re-engagement Stay On List. I’ll change the URL there to Stay On List.
I’m going to duplicate that page, sort by date again, and I’ve got this copy and we’re going to say, Remove From List and make that the URL. Update. And then we’ll edit it with Elementor.
I’m going to just change this to say You Will No Longer Receive My Emails. And maybe change this to a less happy picture. It’s good to still have a picture on there just to show that you acknowledge them and to keep that human face on your brand. Then you’ll publish that page and head back to your Dashboard to get those two links.
Tip #3 – Create a Page Using Canva
Sort by date again so those two come up to the top. But, before I grab these links, I’m going to show you how to create something very similar in Canva.
Choose Create A Design. I’m going to search for website.
And we’re going to do something very similar here. We’re just going to add some text. It says, “Thanks! You will continue to receive my emails.” Left align that and then add an image. Then we’ll choose ‘publish website.’
The free domain is totally fine. Make sure you have the resize on mobile there, hit continue. It’s asking, what do you want this website to be called? You’ll call it something like ‘getemails’ then click continue.
Now we have the URL for that one. We’ll go back and do the same thing again and change the text.
Now we’re going to add something at the end of this that just maybe says, No thanks. Publish. And now you’ve got a link for your No thanks page for your continue to receive emails page.
Where to Add Page Links in Convertkit
The next step is to use these links inside of Convertkit. We’re going to do that by going to Automate -> Rules.
I’m going to choose New Rule -> Clicks a link. You can title this whatever you want. No one is going to see the title it’s just for you to know what it is. So I’m going to put ‘please unsubscribe me.’
And then your destination url is your “no” page. I know Mel’s gonna want them on her website so I’m going to choose her website one. But if you don’t have a website, you can do this with Canva, you’ll grab the URL you just created (the no thanks one). This is where people will go when they click on that link. Then what do we want to have happen when they do that? We want to add a tag. And what tag do we want to add? Let’s go back to that visual automation.
Cold subscriber delete that’s the tag that we want to add. So we’re going to find that cold subscriber delete -> Save Role. We’re going to create a new role -> Clicks on a link. Stay on list. And now can you guess what we’re going to do? We’re going to choose the stay on list url. Then we’re going to choose add a tag. And we want to add the reactivate tag.
Now we have these two rules that exist. The next step is to go over to your sequence: Send -> Sequences.
We’re going to find the sequence that was copied into your account. Copy of cold subscriber re-engagement.
You can use what they have in here. This is a note from convert kit that you want to make sure that you delete. It’s telling you to create that link trigger. So we’re going to delete that.
They have three different emails. They basically all say the exact same thing and you’re welcome to use Convertkit emails. You can use them and change them a little bit to fit or you can write your own. This ‘achieve desired goal,’ you want to definitely change to what yours is.
So I’m going to delete that and Melanie teaches about emergency preparedness. It probably doesn’t need to be bolded, it’s bolded so that you notice it. And then ‘just click here to stop receiving emails from me,’ we’re going to edit that, and we’re going to choose the stay on list trigger that we just created. So when they click on this link, they’re going to get the Reactivated – do not delete.
Then, we will add ‘Click here to be unsubscribed.’ You’ll highlight that sentence and click on the little chain link icon and add a link.
Insert link and we’re going to choose a link trigger. Please unsubscribe me. So they’ll get the cold subscriber delete tag, which means they will stop getting these other three emails.
I’m gonna add Melanie’s name then publish this. I’m going to change it to zero days so that it is sent immediately. Change it to active, then Save All.
I highly suggest that you go through and edit these other two emails. I’m not going to take the time to do that right now. They can say basically the same thing. I wouldn’t worry a whole lot about changing the copy of your actual email, but I would make sure that I change the subject line each time.
For now I’m just going to choose. Save all.
The final step is to actually trigger the automation. So we’re going to choose Grow -> Subscribers.
Instead of confirmed subscribers, we are going to choose cold subscribers.
Convertkit defines ‘cold subscribers’ as people who have not engaged in your emails in the last 90 days and have been on your list for at least 30 days.
Engagement means opening or clicking your emails.
The reason why we send these re-engagement emails is because sometimes people can get on this list by accident. In order for, for an email open to count, it has to load an image. Now don’t worry if your emails don’t have images in them. Convertkit loads a really, really, really tiny one down at the bottom of every email that gets sent automatically for you.
If somebody has images turned off in their email platform, like Yahoo or Gmail, then those images won’t load. So, they could be opening your emails and still beyond this cold subscriber list. That is why we send that re-engagement sequence.
We’re going to click on Subscriber, it’s only going to choose the first 30. So you have to then choose to do all 1,665.
Then you’re going to go to Bulk Actions -> Add tag.
Then you want to add the tag that triggers your cold subscriber re-engagement sequence. Choose Save.
This way you’re keeping your list really clean, which will increase email open rates. Which in turn will increase your deliverability rate. If you want to continue getting Convertkit tips and tricks and more, make sure that you grab my Tech Toolkit. This will get you a list of my 6 favorite tech tools, one of which is Convertkit, plus tutorials for how to set each one up and use it effectively. If this tutorial was helpful ,leave me a comment and tell someone else about it. Thanks. I’ll see you next time.
