Email Marketing – How I’ve Increased Open Rates To Over 26% Using Humor…

If you’ve been marketing on the internet and into email marketing at all in the last several years… you’ve probably noticed that it is getting a bit more difficult every year to keep those open rates up… and even more… get those click throughs where we need them to be. People are getting so many emails... most of the pure junk… that they really need to have a compelling reason why they should spend their valuable time opening your email and reading what you have to say.

I believe heavily in the “history repeats itself” philosophy, and just like everything else… history once again is repeating itself. You can equate the current state of email marketing (i.e. – lower open rates, higher spam counts, lower interest in email) to how direct mail marketing was after the “newness” wore off.

When direct mail marketing first started, people gobbled up every piece of mail like it was candy because it was so darn exciting getting mail… from anyone… even if they were selling something. Now, direct marketers need to be pretty damn creative to get their pieces opened up… and even more so to get the prospect to respond in the desired way.

That’s Exactly Where Email Marketing Is…

Email marketing had it’s day in the sun too when open rates were crazy high simply because people were so excited when they heard the “You’ve Got Mail” ping. It was something new.

People look forward to hearing from their friends, finding something funny or amusing in their email to bring out a chuckle, and learning things that genuinely help them improve some part of their life or business. That’s what email started out being… and that’s what people really want from email at their core.

Getting At Peoples Core Is SO Important To Marketing In Today’s World…

People don’t like to be marketed to.

Plain and simple. If I walk into a car dealership I dread it when I see a salesman coming my way because I know their ONLY mission is to get me to overpay for a car… and drive that car out of the lot TODAY. I go on the defensive immediately.

However, what if the car salesman stigma changed overnight… and car salesman were instead seen as delightful people who have MY BEST INTERESTS genuinely in mind? They provided valuable information to me without pushing a sale… actually made me feel a bit happy when I saw them walking my way (I know, ya right!).

Wouldn’t that make you way more likely to walk into a car lot just to browse and see what they are all about? Wouldn’t that in turn make you more likely to head back to that car lot once you were ready to buy a car? I know it would make a huge difference to me.

That is what I really want in an ideal world of buying a car. That’s my core. If car lots marketed to me in that way… they would have huge success because they would be marketing to MY CORE.

Now, what if we translate that to email marketing? How can that affect your open and response rates? From experience, I can tell you that it DOES affect them hugely!

Increasing Email Open Rates By Talking To Your Prospects Core With Humor

Everyone likes humor in some shape or form. Deep down in our core beings we all like to smile, laugh, and enjoy ourselves. That’s just human nature.

A few months back I helped a client of mine start an email newsletter to their target audience of attorneys (I know, not the easiest market to target). This email newsletter has been hugely successful for my client for several reasons. Over the next month or so, I will break down different aspects of the newsletter that have made it successful so you can implement similar elements into your email marketing campaigns.

A Bit About The Market… and The List

To put everything in context, I want to describe the list a bit. Here we go:

• Market – Attorneys (specific niche within this market)
• Relationship w/ List – No prior relationship w/ 95% of the list
• Email List Size – Started at a bit over 700… and is currently a bit over 2,000 (and growing). By May the list will be right around 4,000 targeted attorneys.
• Our Objective - To build a relationship w/ new prospects by being real, and providing them with actionable information and resources that can help them protect themselves and their clients. No sales pitches, no solicitations, just content.
• Email Frequency - We chose to send the newsletter out approx. every 2 weeks.

Our Unique Approach With A Tough Market

Getting your emails opened is the first hurdle in email marketing. If the email doesn’t get opened your message doesn’t get read… if your message isn’t read… your offer can’t be acted on.

Even more difficult is getting your emails opened on a consistent basis and actually building a solid relationship with your target audience.

So, when developing the structure and content plan of the email newsletter we knew that we had to do something a bit differently than the company had done in the past (i.e. – send out boring semi-generic newsletters focused on their services).

Here’s what we came up with to roll out: (not scientific… just sat down and thought up things that we would like to see if we were the prospect… we got in their “core”). Following is the exact format of the newsletter… in this order.

• 1 short (3-5 minutes), main on-topic video of the company president (my client) discussing an important issue that he has come across in recent cases that is of interest to their attorney prospects. Basically, things that can help the attorney protect their clients better, and limit their own liability.
• 2-3 recent news articles that affect the attorney prospects business and their clients well being. Usually include a 1-2 sentence lead and a straight link to the article.
• 1-2 funny, amusing, or thought provoking resources (articles/videos) that have NOTHING to do with the clients business. Just something to entertain them and pique their interest for future emails from us… but that is targeted at the overall demographic of the target market. Be sure to place these at the bottom of the newsletter so the prospect has to read past the “on topic” resources first to get to them.

That’s it. We shot it out to a COLD list who has never received an email from my client before and wrote up a short intro to the newsletter explaining:

• who we are
• why they are getting the email newsletter
• what they will find
• how to unsubscribe if they simply don’t want another email in their inbox

The key to the whole intro and the entire newsletter is to let the personality of the company president shine through. Attorneys are people too and they don’t like to be talked to like robots… they like conversational tones like the rest of us.

The Results Of The Campaign

Email Newsletter #1:

Here’s a screen shot of the first email blast we did to this cold list. On the left you can see that 791 emails were sent, 166 opened (22.4%), and just 11 unsubscribed. One thing that surprised me was how low the click through rate was, at only 13.2% of those who opened the email. Once again, this is a cold list who had never received an email from this company before.

I almost half expected more people to unsubscribe from the list on the next few newsletters… we’ll see if that happened.

Email Newsletter #2:

You can see in this edition, we didn’t add any new contacts to the list and actually had an open rate of 23.2%, which is higher than our first edition. This time our click through rate doubled to 23.8% of those who opened, and only 3 unsubscribes. Once again, this is the 2nd email these people have even received from the company.

We were really happy with these results… and this newsletter actually resulted in 3 direct phone calls to my client from these attorneys for potential future collaboration (in addition to several emails as well).

Newsletter #3 was very similar to #2 so I’ll skip to #4. Actually, #3 had a similar open rate but the click through rate jumped up to about 29% of those who opened. Nice.

Email Newsletter #4:

For this edition we more than doubled our email list of targeted prospects (once again, first time contacts from my client) to about 2,127. Our open rate dropped a bit to 16.8% which we were expecting a bit since we dramatically increased the size of the list… and the click through rate also decreased a bit.

What we were very happy with though was the very low unsubscribe rate as a result of our tweaked intro message. This time we only had 7 unsubscribes out of over 2,100… pretty good in my book for a very cold list to a very stiff and time poor market.

The bounce rate is pretty decent for a cold list like this… so we weren’t too concerned at all. Especially since this is NOT a purchased list… I used some list building NINJA techniques (just kidding, shoot me an email to discuss if you want) to build this list without purchasing a single contact… or using the company’s current database.

Email Newsletter #5:

This is the most recent issue of the newsletter. We tweaked the format of the newsletter a bit after the last one and actually added a 2nd amusing/funny resource at the bottom of the newsletter. Issue #4 only had one… and we didn’t write a very thought provoking headline that referenced the funny piece. In this issue, we made sure to reference the funny piece in the email subject line.

Open rates jumped back up to over 20% and almost 30% of everyone who opened clicked on a link. Once again, the unsubscribe rate stays low.

What Does All of This Mean?

Yes, these screen shots are pretty cool to look at and they do show pretty good statistics for a cold list.

As a whole, what they do show is that this newsletter has built a bond with the list and the list is choosing to repeatedly click through to see what we have to say. If our format wasn’t working… I’d expect open rates to steadily drop and unsubscribes to steadily increase. In both instances however, the statistics are actually improving.

Even more… I’m going to give you some great statistics to prove that the humor is a big part in the success in the newsletter. Below describes which type of information is clicked on the most in each issue of the newsletter:

• Issue #1: Humor videos/articles were the number 2 and 3 most clicked on resources out of the 6 included… and accounted for almost 35% of the clicks.
• Issue #2: Humor was the 3rd and 4th most clicked on out of 6 accounting for just over 35% of the clicks.
• Issue #3: Humor 3rd and 4th most clicked on again and accounted for 25% of the clicks.
• Issue #4: Humor was the 2nd and 5th most clicked on for 28% of the clicks.
• Issue #5: Humor was the 2nd most clicked on for 17% of the clicks.

Now, at first glance you might be saying… “Why would you want all of those clicks “wasted” on humorous articles that don’t sell the prospect anything at all?”

In my mind, these articles are obviously popular… and are playing a big role in getting these attorneys to open the emails in the first place.

In addition, for ALL of the humorous and amusing articles/videos… we are hosting these resources on back pages of the clients website… so when they click on the teaser copy from our email newsletter they are taken to our website where they can then see the humorous resource.

What’s right next to that video or article?

Several calls to action and more information about how my client can help the attorney protect their client better. Everyone wins.

What I’ve Learned From This Test

This email newsletter project has taught me a ton about getting to the core of the prospect… especially in email… and to markets that are time poor such as attorneys.

More than anything, no matter what your market is… you need to come up with ways to compel people to WANT to open your emails… even if those reasons have NOTHING to do with your services/products. I can tell you from experience that overtly soliciting business and not using every possibility to benefit your prospect in EVERY WAY is pretty much a waste of time nowadays.

So, no matter what market you are in… please… please find a way to better relate with your prospect through your emails. Look beyond how you can help your prospect as far as your services and products go… find ways to benefit your prospect in their everyday lives. Inject some humor into your newsletters, personality, and make your newsletters something worth looking forward to…

… and more than anything… make your newsletters something WORTH OPENING.

Wow! That was a bit longer than I expected. In the next few weeks I’ll go more in-depth about the specifics of the newsletter campaign.

If you want to chat about your newsletter and how you can use it to better improve your bottom line… shoot me an email or give me a ring.