Last week we spoke about the soap opera impact on your emails, however today I want to get deeper into getting more of your emails opened.

So here goes.

If you are like me, and I did this, this very morning, you'll know the feeling.

I woke up.

Picked up my phone from my bedside cabinet.

Checked the time.

Opened my emails.

35 new emails overnight.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

Purge. Purge. Purge.

Instantly, I was down to 3 emails that I left unread for later today.

So I killed over 90% of my inbox in literally 30 seconds.

All of that wasted time from the email writers and senders.

All because they didn't follow the three simple rules. Plus a bonus fourth one (shhhh!)

Rule #1

Make sure your email comes from a named person - not info@, office@ or worse still sales@. You can see that William and I send these to you each Friday morning and they come from William & Jim. We are real people.

Instantly you are more inclined to at least keep us in your inbox a little longer.

Phew.

Rule #2

Make the subject line interesting and not salesy.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also makes your readers want to know more. So rather than a subject line that says, "Save Money on X Here" which screams "buy my stuff!" use creative language to help people believe that there is value in your content.

Rule #3

Make the first pararaph somewhat interesting. Congratulations if you have got your email recipient to this point - but now you need to engage them to read on further to get your message.

You may also need to put the right snippet in the short form description of your email to entice them to open it, however if your first paragraph is also interest inducing, their email server will show this under the subject line in their inbox.

Rue #4

With emails,the best way to get engagement is to offer value regularly. Every time you offer your readership value in your content you are building credit in the bank.

Every time you ask for something, e.g. them to do something, buy something, book a call etc you are withdrawing on that credit.

Make it a 6:1 ratio of giving value to requesting.for something and you won't annoy people, they will open more of your emails and possibly invest more with you.

And we practice what we preach here at BGF - yes, there are links to click below the signature if you want to, however we very rarely ask you to do something - all we want to do is help business owners like you be better and get more from your business.

Speak soon!

James