So, you’ve written a great email.
You upload it to your marketing automation system….
Press “send”…
And what percentage of your audience open and read it? 20%? 30%? 40%, if you’ve really struck gold?
Somehow we’ve all convinced ourselves that if a third of our audience reads what we say, we’ve done incredibly well.
But if you think about it for a moment, it’s a little dispiriting. All that work… All those nuggets of wisdom…. All those sales opportunities….
And yet, over half your list never reads a word of it. What a waste!
So today I want to share with you a little trick to get more people to read your emails. I call it the Déjà vu Hack.
It’s so easy, it’s actually hard to believe so few people do it.
But boy, is it effective.
Quite simply: A couple of days after sending your email, send it out again to anyone who didn’t open it.
You can keep the exact same text in the body of the email – after all, this audience never read it – but change the subject line. That way, if they didn’t open your original email because your subject line didn’t interest them, you get a second bite at the cherry. And if they simply never saw your original email… Or meant to open it later but never got round to it…. Well, you get a second bite at the cherry.
Now, this isn’t a strategy you want to use for every email, because it would be too easy to end up spamming people. Reserve it for emails that are particularly important – announcements, launching new resources and so on.
The open rate for your second email blast will be 25-40% lower. After all, these are almost by definition your less engaged subscribers.
But if you have a mailing list of several thousand people, that still means, cumulatively, a lot of extra people reading your email, and a lot more mileage for your content.
And that’s what we all want!
