by: Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey. What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 199 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. We have a great question today from Joel.
But before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com/AskPat, the easy-to-use cloud accounting solution for all of your accounting needs, especially if you're invoicing people. Whether you're a coach or consultant or you have clients, invoicing with FreshBooks is super professional, super easy, super fast, so you can do more of what is making you money, and less of just trying to organize your money. I seriously wish FreshBooks is something I got hooked up with when I first started because I didn't, and I was using Excel, and it was just a lot of hard work, right? There are tools out there that can help us do a lot of these things that we shouldn't be doing ourselves. So if you go to freshbooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section, you can actually get it for free for seven days. Seven day free trial. “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section at FreshBooks.com/AskPat.
Awesome. Now let's get to today's question from Joel.
Joel: Hey, Pat. Joel here from TrackAndTrain.org. My question for you today is about email marketing. When you send an email out to a group of people, some will respond and some won't. Would you try resending the same email with a different subject line to the people who didn't open the first email? Or do you think it would be a better idea to focus on the people who did open the first email, but did not click through to learn about your offer? Or maybe there's another tactic you would use here. Thanks, Pat.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Joel. Thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it. As always, an AskPat t-shirt is headed your way.
And to answer your question, this is email marketing right? Everybody knows we all should have an email list. If you don't have an email list, you should go to StartAnemailList.com. That'll help you get set up with an easy to use email service provider, and how to set it up correctly and things like that. If you do have an email list, great. You're probably sending emails out to your audience and you've probably noticed that not 100% of those who have subscribed to your list open your emails. And there could be a number of different reasons for that, from they just aren't good leads anymore, or they're busy at the time and they just missed your email, or maybe it's just the topic, the subject line, just doesn't interest them. So there's a number of different things to think about when it comes to why people aren't opening your emails.
But one thing that Joel brought up is a great strategy to get more people to open, and that is to send people who didn't open that initial email that you sent another email with the same stuff. This is something that I've actually tested out before in the past. I've tested it, and yes, it does absolutely work. However, in sending the exact same email to people who didn't open, it didn't always work the right way or 100% all the time. Because what happened is some people who read the email in a preview, they didn't register as somebody who opened the email, and so they got the same email again. When it came back, I did get a few complaints. So I've stopped using that particular technique.
But there is another technique that I've been using that's been working really well, and I should probably do more of this, because when you hear it, you're going to hear how it just makes complete sent. You send an email out to your audience. That's the first step. Obviously, you want it to have great content. You want to have a great, eye-catching subject line, something that's going to really intrigue people so people who do see it will click on it. And even when you do that, not everybody's going to click on it, but of course you want to give it the best chance. So you send that out, and you'll notice after some time that not everybody has opened that email. So what you want to do is segment that—create a new list of people. What you can do is segment, or actually send an email. Depending on what email service provider you have, you can either segment out the people who didn't open that email or you can just simply click—I believe AWeber has the ability to just resend an email to those who didn't open.
You'll want to customize it, because that's part of the strategy here. You don't want to send them the exact same thing, because chances are they might have seen it already. But even if they did or they didn't, you want it to make sense for them. So here's the trick. You want to do a different subject line. You can change it a little bit, or just have it be different from your initial one. But you also want to have it be there as a purposeful email for people who didn't read it the first time. So it might say something in the email like, “Hey, we sent this email out earlier but noticed that you probably didn't see it, and if you did that's okay, because there's more information in this,” about whatever it is that call to action was, or that topic was.
So the cool thing is, you can resend the email. Use a different subject line, and different copy. You can copy and paste most of it, but I would add some different copy at the beginning, just so it doesn't seem like it's the same thing, and add more value in there as well. You don't want it to be a, “Oh, you missed this earlier. Here it is again.” You want it to be, “Here's what went out earlier, and here's what happened since.” Perhaps there's some comments that came in, and you can add some social proof to that email to get the people who, even if they saw it already, to see that it's different. But maybe they saw it, and didn't click that link that's in that article, or email, and now they're going to click because there's some social proof. Maybe it's a really great comment, somebody saying, “Wow, this is one of the best articles I've read in a long time,” or, “This is definitely going to help me.” Something like that. Or maybe you can say, “Wow, 50 comments have already come in. Why don't you come in and add your own?” Things like that will add value to show people that this is actually a post worth reading, and that's going to help a lot.
You could be creative. You can make it different, and you can send out that email to people who didn't open and not have to worry as much, if you focus on really making sure that your still continually adding value, and something different than when you sent the email earlier. Yes, you want it to be the same call to action, because that's why you're sending that initial email in the first place. Maybe it's a link to a blog post, or a link to a particular product, or a link somewhere else, or even getting a reply. Those are all different calls to action, but there are different ways to lead up to it.
Like I said earlier, yes, it's totally cool to send an email to people who didn't open, but if you change it up a little bit, it'll make it even cooler, because you won't be upsetting people who perhaps saw that email in a preview. People who didn't see the email, they might be reminded of how great that content is. But what it really comes down to is, again, making sure that you have great content and you're always thinking about how you can provide value to your audience.
So why don't you all test it out? Try resending an email to people who didn't open, and see what happens. A lot of people are scared to do that, and I understand why; you don't want to be spammy. But you won't be, because you're not trying to be that. You're actually trying to help people out.
So keep that in mind, and awesome. Joel thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. An AskPat t-shirt is going to be headed your way. You'll get an email from my assistant in the next week or two about that, and we'll set you up and get you all fitted and all that stuff. Not fitted like we're going to go over there and actually measure you, but anyway. You'll get an email from my assistant soon.
For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on the page. Just click on the button. Use any mic that you have handy. The audio quality doesn't have to be good. You might have heard audio from earlier this week that wasn't all that good, but this is real life. I'm not going to give preference just for the audio. As long as it's legible and we can hear it, that's awesome.
Thank you so much. Again, I want to thank today's sponsor which is FreshBooks.com/AskPat, the easy to use cloud accounting solution. They also have a mobile app, an award winning mobile app, actually. So you can keep track of your finances, stuff coming in, stuff going out, making sure you're on top of it, so that you can spend more time doing what you need to do and you let FreshBooks do all the handling of all the income stuff. Come tax season, which is going to creep up on us very soon, it's just going to make it really easy to click and print reports for whether you do the taxes yourself, or you have a CPA, or somebody else doing it for you. Again, you can go to FreshBooks.com/AskPat and enter AskPat in the “How did you hear about us?” section to get a free trial. Check it out today.
As always, I want to end with a quote, and this is a quote from an unknown person. So if you know this person, let me know so I can change it. But I don't know. I don't know who said this, but this is a great quote. “Never give up on something you can't go a day without thinking about.”
So what is it that you're thinking about? Every single day, if you're not trying to do that, or reach those goals, those things that you can't just—it'd be crazy for you not to think about those things. If you're not trying to get those things in your life, or do those things, then you're crazy. Never give up. You got it. Keep pushing forward.
Have a great weekend everybody. I'll see you on Monday, in Episode 200 of AskPat. Thank you so much, and I'll see you in the next episode.
