Increasing Your Email Open Rates To Make WAY More Money In Your Business

All right, so we’re gearing up to launch the beyond the apex community. And one of the things that we’ve been doing is we’ve been collecting insights and about what are the biggest trouble points that entrepreneurs are having, people who are interested in joining this program, we’re trying to figure out how can we create the absolute most valuable resource for entrepreneurs who are driven to maximize their return on life. And the way that we look at it is that there’s really three components, right? You need to have your rocket ship, which is the business that’s going to, you know, take you to the moon. You have to have the pilot, you as the astronaut, the person who’s able to pilot that vehicle, because the. The pilot is, or the vehicle is only going to go as fast and far as you, the pilot, are capable of navigating it. And then third is that we have to have the destination. We have to know where we’re going, right? And so that is the mission of beyond the apex, the, the group training coaching program, program that we’re going to be launching here in the next month. If you guys want to join, if you’re interested, if you think that’s something that would bring you value, you can go join the waitlist@beyondtheapex.com.

Dot we’re going to be opening it up to a select number of people for the first cohort. And then three months later ish, we’ll open the doors again and bring in another cohort. But we just want to make sure that we can serve everybody incredibly well. Anyway, I mention all that to say that if you go to beyondtheapex.com to sign up, you’ll go through a little form and at the very end asks you a question. The question is, if you could wave a magic wand and overnight just fix any singular problem inside of your business, what is that big problem that you would like to solve? And we have collected so many interesting results from that. Very interesting. Like, some people have some very interesting problems, but we’ve identified a number of them that were like, cool. This is something that we can definitively help with.

And today I want to talk about one of those, which was, how can I improve my email open rates. Now, the email list is one of the most valuable resources, assets that your business has, because this is the means that you have to connect with your audience. You know, social media is great. It’s great to have hundreds of thousands of followers, and that’s fantastic. However, those social media platforms, they have all the control. So if they decide to turn off your, you know, your reach overnight, then you suddenly can’t get in front of your audience. If they shut down your account, you are effectively cut off. And that can really kill a business.
So we need to have a way of collecting information about our audience that gives us the means to reach out to them in the future. Because in business, the magic is in the follow up. It truly is. So if we have our email list, the next question that we have to figure out is how do we actually get people to open our emails? And that’s what I want to talk about today is I want to talk about how we can increase our email open rates. And this really starts by first understanding what is a good open rate that you should be striving for within your business. Now, in my experience, I’ve used email lists across multiple businesses and multiple verticals, multiple industries. And what I have found is that depending on the type of business that you have, you should aim for an open rate, somewhere between 30 and 40%. That’s a good open rate.
If you can go 40, 50, 60%, you’re doing fantastic. For context, my personal newsletter, the hyper focused entrepreneur, that has about a 55% to 60% open rate. Very high click. Very, very, very high open rate. Considering how many people we send it to and how frequently send it, that is probably on the upper end of what you can expect, by comparison, escape climbing. We send that email and we probably get about a 32% to 35% open rate. Invictus. We send it and we get anywhere, we probably get around a 50% open rate there as well.
So the power of personal brand is that people will be more likely to open your emails because they’re more familiar with you rather than if the email is just coming from some no name business. And that’s one of the reasons that I’m a big fan of having a personal brand. But that’s a good, that’s a good benchmark to aim for. Is that 30%, if you’re not at least at that 30% open rate, you’re doing something wrong and we need to solve for it because you’re probably going to spam, you’re probably getting whitelisted or blacklisted or whatever it’s called, so that your emails aren’t even arriving. Or if you’re, if you’re, people are seeing your email, they’re not opening it. They don’t think it’s valuable enough to spend their time on. So we need to solve for that. A lot of the students that I start working with one of the reasons their business isn’t growing is we’re seeing like 15 20% open rates and it’s like that.
You’re never going to grow a business. If the people who have opted into being on your email list aren’t even interested in opening the email, you’re in a lot of trouble. So that can be kind of like a canary in the coal mine situation telling you something’s not right if you have extraordinary extraordinarily low open rates. Now let’s walk through this. A couple things to be thinking about. Number one is if your email open rate is low, first thing that you’re going to want to look at is your domain might not have enough authority. You might have done something to damage your domain’s authority rating so that it’s immediately just going straight to spam. That’s number one.
So if you’ve been sending a lot of emails over the years and you have been maintaining less than 20% open rate, there’s a good chance that you’ve damaged the reputation of the domain. That right there is going to be a very, very hard thing to fix. And this is one of the reasons why I don’t recommend sending emails from your primary inbox, which is like for me, you know, my most important inbox is my personal name at whatever the domain is, right? If that gets blacklisted for whatever reason that email, if I’m sending it to personal contacts like one on one, not even within the email list, that’s not going to get through and that’s a big problem. So don’t use that. You want to use a secondary throwaway account, but it’s all going to be rooted in the domain itself. And if you damage that, you might be having a really hard time repairing that reputation. So that’s the first thing to think about. Number two is you want to clean your list.
The easiest way to boost your open rates is to get all the people off your list who aren’t engaging with your emails. That’s first and foremost. If you sent out ten emails and they haven’t opened any of them, get rid of them. They’re only pulling down your averages and they’re hurting your deliverability again, getting that reputation that you have with the service provider. So what I like to do is I set up an automation, whether that’s through convertkit or through active campaign. Any CRM that you use for your email list gives you the ability to set up an automation so that if somebody hasn’t engaged over a certain period of time, with a certain number of campaigns, it just gets rid of them. So it gives them a score. It says you’re five stars because you open and engage with everything.
You’re a one star because you never engage with anything. So every three months or so I like to clean off the list, get rid of those one stars and those two stars keeps the list clean, pulls up my open rates and it makes sure that my emails are getting to the people that I want. You don’t want people on your list. The size of your list is irrelevant. What really matters is how many people are engaging with it. So if they’re not, get rid of them. That’s number one. Number two is actually, I don’t know why I’m saying number two.
I’m like, there’s no list here. I haven’t written these out as a list. So next is think about the double opt in. So a lot of the times getting high open rates starts with how you onboard somebody. So if somebody signs up for your email list, a lot of times we’re using a lead magnet for that. Hey, if you sign up for this, if you want this resource, just give me your email. Right. A lot of times people don’t actually want to be on your email list.
They just want that lead magnet and they will give you the email address, but they’re not really going to be engaging with you content moving forward. So the double opt in is a great way just to make sure that the people who are actually signing up, they want to be there. And so again, any of your CRM providers should have a button that you can click that says double opt in. And so what that does is if they are on your website, they’re like, I would like this spreadsheet, this resource, this workbook. They sign up for it and immediately sends them an email that says, hey, click here to, you know, if you, if you really wanted to subscribe, click here. Right. That double opt in is going to make sure that your people that actually want to be there are showing up. They’re going to be engaging.
So that’s really, really valuable. Again, we don’t want people on our list that don’t have any intention, they don’t really want to be there. Get rid of them. Give them the free resource. If they love it, they can always come back and sign up later. Another tactic here is to have them respond to that first email that you send out in your campaigns or automations. I like to have a little call to action in there says, hey, by the way, if you respond onto this email. It makes it 83% more likely for this and this email to land in your inbox in the future and not go directly to spam.
So you’ve signed up for this and I’m going to be giving a lot of free resources. If you want to continue getting that, just do me a favor, quickly hit reply and tell me what brought you here. Like where’d you come from? Right? And that right there. When people do that, it programs their email provider to say, hey, he’s, he’s responding to this email. So this must not be spam. This must be coming from a trusted resource and that’s going to help that get in front of them in the future, which improves their click through rate. And that’s a very, very valuable technique as well. And if you ask them a good question about how they got here or what they’re struggling with, that can be a great source of feedback for you to figure out.
How can I serve this audience moving forward? Okay, let’s talk about the three things about the email itself that will help with the deliverability. So we just talked about, okay, we need to, you know, create the environment. We need to cultivate the garden so that the fruits can blossom. Right now let’s talk about those fruits themselves. Number one is headlines. Your hook has to be good if you want people to open your emails. You have to have a good headline because they are getting hit with dozens of emails every single day from companies just like you. So you have to stand out.
That is going to go beyond the scope of how we do that. That particular technique I’ve done in the past about how you can hook attention through the power of copywriting. Go check out those episodes again. This is one of the things that we’ll be getting into. The nuts and bolts and then weeds of in the beyond the apex community is like how to actually create engaging headlines, engaging content, engaging ads that get people to, you know, sit up and pay attention, but beyond the scope of this podcast today. Next is pictures and videos. I don’t like including a lot of pictures and videos in my emails that I send to customers or to my audience because it bogs down their inbox. It makes it more likely that the provider is going to flag it as spam.
And honestly, a lot. It’s not needed in a lot of cases. So if you’re going to have a picture or two, just one or two pictures, make sure that they’re sized appropriately so they don’t destroy people’s inboxes. And then be light on the videos, lots of links to videos, that’s fine. But avoid just destroying people’s inbox. Then also avoid spreading spammy words because a lot of inboxes these days have spam filters. So if you’re saying, hey, here’s how to get rich quick, that’s going to be one of the things that immediately throws you to spam. So just be conscious that you’re not using spammy language in the email itself.

And then the most important thing of everything for getting people to open your emails is to have really good emails. I know that seems really obvious, but if you send a magnificent email that you’ve put a ton of time and energy into, that brings quantitative value to, to your audience and they love it. Of course they’re going to open the next one. So quality is the key to getting really high click through rates and really highly engaged audience and of course to making sales. So hopefully this helps you guys if you want to go even deeper, because this is a, there’s so many different levers that we can pull, so many different ways that we can refine our machine. If you’re interested in doing that, if you’re a five or six figure entrepreneur or even seven figure and you’re looking to make that jump to seven or eight figures and beyond, then beyond the apex.com that is going to be for you, go check it out. Love to see you on the inside. And until then, yeah, that’s all I got.

We’ll see you in the next episode, everybody. Until then, stay happy. Focus, my friends.