Ep. 57: 5 Tips to boost email reader response

Authentic Online Marketing with Ruthie Gray

5 Tips to boost email reader response. Do you ever wonder why your email subscribers don’t reply when you ask them to? Or maybe they’re not clicking your links It can be frustrating when you feel as if no one cares about your newsletter.

But, you can turn that around with just a few tweaks! You may know that I teach email marketing inside Authentic Online Marketing School, and students learn to seamlessly coordinate Instagram with email with different techniques, one of which is turning followers into subscribers.

But once they become subscribers, how do you get them to respond? Today’s short podcast contains a discussion with Authentic Online Marketing school students asking the same question.

In this episode you’ll hear how I received replies flooding my inbox from a recent newsletter, the strategy behind it, how to know what to send to get readers responding, a great repurposing tip, and more!

By the way, doors are opening soon for our early Black Friday offering on Authentic Online Marketing School, so be sure to join our newsletter either by subscribing to the 30-Day Simply Stories challenge or our AOM Waitlist! We’ve got some never before offered bonuses you won’t want to miss, and if you’re ready to solidify your Instagram and Email marketing strategy so you can market effectively and get those subscribers responding, you’ll want to get in on the Black Friday Bonanza! Ready to hear how to Boost email reader response? Listen in!

Resources

*This episode contains either affiliate links or links to my products. Should you choose to purchase, the show will go on! Woo hoo!

Join the Waitlist for Authentic Online Marketing School

Listen to Ep. 61: Combining Instagram and email marketing in 5 smart ways

Listen to Ep. 64: Building A YouTube Channel From Repurposed Content

Listen to Ep. 76: Convert Instagram Followers into Email Subscribers: How It Works

Listen to Ep. 75: Email Subscriber Strategies for Authors

Your email reader response to pain points

Aimee: The interesting thing about pain points in life is we have the same ones, way more than we realize to think is what’s powerful about these is if we can pull out that pain. It breaks the isolation

Ruthie:. Yes. That’s how you have that power of the one on one with that reader. And she knows that you really get her. You guys should have received an email last week from m. And it was all about how I thought I wrote “Let it Be” on my toy box.

Aimee: Yeah, that was a great story. I love that one.

Ruthie: thank you. So here’s the thing, and I want y’all to remember this. One call to action is always the best but this week I told that story and I really hit a pain point. Everybody’s feeling the Reels have dived. The views are down. Everybody’s like, why do they keep changing the rules?

Honestly, you guys I’m there myself and I didn’t leave a call to action, except in the PS. I said, if you’re feeling like this too, if you think you want to join me, hit reply so I can judge interest. I got so many replies. So that’s how if you ever want replies, then you don’t do any other call to action.

A CTA for your email reader response

And that is your call to action. Because I hit that pain point so hard. The thought is, I might do a couple Reels here or there, but really I am interested in this or I need to work on my stories. Anyway, this is a great time to step in or I just don’t even know what to do with stories. So I’m going to do this or they would ask me questions, which was great market research, because for my signup page, then I have a few FAQ’s about won’t I lose followers, or what am I going to do about regular posts or things like that.

That email I wrote last week was close to my heart, but it was something that I repurposed from an Instagram post I did several months back. And I got all kinds of comments on that post, people loved it. Do you think they remembered that when they got that email?

Testing, 1 2 3

You can also test, look at your open rates and how the headline did and and see, how did they respond to this and use your best work and just rework it. So that email that I wrote was repurposed, but with a new twist and a new idea.

So once you do the work, then you don’t have to work so hard later so go back and look, Jennifer, some of the things you’ve written in your for Instagram elsewhere in your blog and things like that. And look at the things that are a little bit further back and see if you can repurpose some of those for your emails. Or go deeper, like you said.

Jennifer: I love that. That is so smart. Ugh. Another thing you had said was about Aimee’s sequence to check and see what people’s response is. I have I am celebrating, but I have 91 subscribers now I had 30 start of summer, so woo. I’m very excited.

Pay attention to engagement

Yeah, that’s good. But I that’s not the same thing as say having 500 subscribers. So for me, when I look at, if I’ve got a hundred subscribers, my perspective of engagement or response is obviously gonna be different than a person who’s got 500 subscribers But what would you say are some of the indicators that this really resonated with people. ‘Cause I don’t get a ton of responses to begin with, but does that mean that nothing I’ve written resonates or so I’m not quite sure how to judge that yet

Ruthie:. So my question is this, have you been get, do you give a call to action every time you send an email, have you been prior to the class

Jennifer: It was always go to my blog because my newsletter was always an introduction to whatever blog I wrote. And sometimes people would go and sometimes they wouldn’t, but now I’ve just started. So maybe I don’t have any.

Email reader response: are they opening them?

Ruthie: The way you judge is if they take action, first of all, do they open the email?

Secondly, are they clicking on anything at all? If there is whatever the call to action is, are they doing it? Are they clicking? Are you getting any clicks? And thirdly, if the call to action is reply, are you getting in any reply? So going forward, you’ll be able to know.

Here’s something I want to put in perspective for you. With email, let’s say you have a hundred people on your email. The average is 30% open rate. That means if you have hundred people, you’re going to have 30 people that actually respond open and then probably like a fraction of those people will respond. So you have to keep that in mind, but the email response return rate is way better than social media, where you’re competing with a whole bunch of other people.

So, what now?

If you have a hundred followers on social media your return rate is actually gonna be 3%. So it’s gonna be three people.

Let’s break down today’s discussion into 5 simple steps to get email readers responding.

1. Know your audience’s pain point. Aimee Smith is a homeschool mom who knows her audience well – other homeschool moms who are exhausted from all the things (and if you’re a homeschool mom, you totally get this, I know I do from back in the day)! In our class training, she submitted her welcome series for feedback during our class coaching session, using a beautiful blend of our CAFÉ method – cue, aim, fire, and edge. The cue targeted the homeschool mom’s pain point. The aim made her see that she could overcome through a few simple steps. The fire contained her call to action – draw from one of the suggestions in the download the subscriber signed up for, and the edge was Aimee’s spin on her brand voice throughout the email. When you know your audience’s pain point, sympathize, and provide a solution, you get their attention.
2. Use the power of story to bridge the gap. Your reader likely has a to-do list a mile long and hundreds of emails flooding her inbox every week. But everyone likes a good story (that’s why we’ve been holding the story challenge all month), so if your readers know they’re going to get that relief from you (think: why do we get sucked into historical fiction or movie comedy when we don’t really need it?), you can alleviate some pressure and make her day better!
3. Do market research and use what followers respond to on Instagram or other social media platforms you’re on! I turned an old Instagram post my followers loved into an email. It was the story of my so called 7-year-old composer fame. But I found a way to bridge the gap from that story to my reader’s pain point (see number one)! Use what works! What posts or other content have you written or spoken that generated response? Make more content like that!
4. The obvious undertow to this whole episode is to leave a call to action. This is what we term the “Fire”, and you should have one in every email. What do you want the reader to do next? Reply? Click a link? Share on Instagram? Don’t forget to tell her what to do!
5. The not-so-obvious step to getting reader’s response is this: Believe in your message. Do you think I got all my subscribers on day one? Nope. I’ve been list building for years. In the early days, I wasn’t sure what to write or even how to get it across or even what my message was. But over time, through training and execution, I found my own voice and writing style, and began attracting my people. Many times I didn’t want to send an email and didn’t believe they’d notice. But because I knew email list building was important, I took the time to do it. And pretty soon, they did notice when I didn’t email. Remember the percentage I gave in the training? You have way more change of your email list responding than you do your social media followers. Believe in your message and stay consistent, because if you don’t believe in your message, your readers will be confused and unsure about responding.

Two things I love the most that I do is Instagram stories and writing my newsletter. It makes sense, because I weave stories throughout my newsletter, and Instagram stories are…well, just exactly that. The behind the scenes threads that compile the you behind your account, as well as your biz, book, podcast, or whatever your big message is. If you haven’t joined our 30-day story challenge, there’s still time, because you’ll receive some great tips on how to foster community and create content your audience wants! And guess what – you can use that content to springboard off that content for your newsletters too! Link is in the shownotes for the 30-Day simply stories challenge, so join us!

Until next week, remember to share your unique message your way in your own authentic voice (and believe in yourself)!

The post Ep. 57: 5 Tips to boost email reader response appeared first on Authentic Online Marketing.