These answers are tailored to business experts (i.e., coaches, consultants, speakers, professional service providers).
1. What is a “good” open rate?
The industry standard is 20%. Anything above that is great.
2. How long should my emails be?
My emails are almost always under 300 words. In rare cases, for value emails, they might be 500 words.
3. How many links can I put in my emails?
Two or fewer links are less likely to trigger your email to land in the spam or promo folder.
4. What’s the best time to send emails?
Read 20 articles and you’ll get 20 answers to this question. In reality, there’s only one way to test. One of my clients (who has 60,000 people on their list) finds that 7 AM and 10 AM EST work best for him. His audience is mostly in the US.
5. What should I say in my emails?
You must wow the sh*t out of people. “Providing value” is not enough. Give them ah-ha moments. Send valuable information that your prospect has never seen before. Trigger the dopamine centers in their brain so people generate positive associations with your information. Use stories, lessons, and case studies to illustrate and color your points.
6. How often should I send emails?
At least 3 times per week. Competition is fierce. Similar to friendships, if you don’t stay in contact, your relationships wither away and eventually fade. Some people advocate for daily emails. You better provide great insights in each email. If people receive too many emails from you and think, “meh,” they won’t stick around. If you send rubbish, your subscribers will quickly unsubscribe.
7. Won’t I annoy people if I email them too often?
No. People get annoyed if they receive irrelevant or boring content. Delight, entertain, and educate.
8. How do I find out what to send them?
You won’t. Not at the start anyway. Reflect on previous clients and their biggest challenges and questions. Start there. Lurk in related Facebook groups and on Reddit posts to see the common challenges people have.
9. I don’t have time to write emails. Have any tips?
Yes
- Create a notes file on your phone. Anytime you think of an insight, story, or client interaction that has something interesting, jot it down.
- Download OpenAI’s ChatGPT app on your phone. The microphone symbol next to their search box uses Whisper. This is the best speech-to-text transcription tool I’ve ever seen. And it’s free! Wild.
- During 2 minutes of downtime during the day, open your notes, pick a topic, and record it into Whisper. Give it the prompt, “Clean up this text.” This gets you a pretty decent email.
10. Should I send broadcast or autoresponder messages?
Both. Most of your emails should be autoresponder messages. As a business expert, you probably don’t have time to create compelling emails daily. An autoresponder is an asset to your business. Then, send broadcast messages for one-time promotions.
11. What’s the most efficient way to create emails?
Create them in bulk. You lose productivity from changing tasks throughout the day. It takes time to get “into the groove.” Crafting them back-to-back makes it faster.
12. Which is better, pretty design HTML or plain emails?
Plain. If you’re an e-commerce store or fashion label, design is more important. For coaches and consultants, plain is best. That’s how you write to a friend. HTML emails and having too many images will land you in Gmail’s promotions tab or, worse, the spam folder. People signed up for the knowledge in your head, not your graphic design skills.
13. What’s a good click-through rate?
According to Campaign Monitor, the average click-through rate is 2-5%. I created an email campaign with a 12.26% average CTR rate. CTOR (click-to-open rate) is a much more useful metric. This means, of the people who opened, how many clicked.
14. What software should I use?
Depends. I use ConvertKit. It’s easy and user-friendly. I chose it because adding and editing emails is lightning-fast. If you just want to paste in an email and move on, it’s great. Plus, if you want more power, ConvertKit has some decent automations.
Aweber is fine too. The tool was one of the first email tools back in the day. It’s slow. It can take 45 seconds to open, edit, and close an email. Aweber has a big advantage over ConvertKit. With autoresponders, you can set emails to go out at any interval you want, e.g., send a specific email at 7 AM for each subscriber’s time zone. This is huge for adding automated sales campaigns. ConvertKit can send autoresponders “after X hours or days” but you can’t make it go out at a specific time. You have to use broadcast messages for that.
15. What if I want an email tool with more automation power?
The most popular choice for business experts, coaches, and consultants is ActiveCampaign. If you want to laser-target your messages to subscribers based on their actions and behavior, use automation. However, it can be sluggish and frustrating when complex automations don’t work. If you’re not a techie, it can feel overwhelming.
16. Should I set up automations or send a basic email sequence?
Automation is powerful but complicated. Be careful. If you have the time, resources, and team, invest in automation. Otherwise, just stick with a basic autoresponder sequence (emails that go out at a pre-determined time one after the other). It’s much easier to start with something like ConvertKit and move on to something with automations later on if you want.
17. What’s the fastest way to launch an email list?
Sign up for ConvertKit and fill out a pre-made landing page template. These pages are hosted on their own server, so you don’t need any hosting. However, to make it more professional, redirect it to your own domain. Domains are cheap.
18. What is email deliverability?
Deliverability is the art of ensuring your emails are received by your subscribers. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) can block emails if your emails get flagged as spam.
19. How do I improve my email deliverability?
Send emails that get opened, read, scrolled, clicked, and replied to. Do everything you can to reduce your spam complaints and unsubscribes. Flush your email list of subscribers who don’t click on your emails after 60-90 days.
20. How do I stop people from unsubscribing from my list?
You can’t. Some people will always unsubscribe. Set the right expectation BEFORE people subscribe so there are no surprises for them. Fulfill upon the expectation. For example, if you plan to send daily emails with occasional promotions, tell people before they sign up.
21. Isn’t social media better than email marketing?
No. Social media and email marketing work together. Social media is a lead acquisition strategy (stranger to acquaintance). It helps you build your email list. With email, you turn leads from acquaintances into fans and clients. Email marketing takes leads and turns them into clients. Email is more intimate and personal. Plus, it’s an asset you own. Social platforms will come and go, but email has stood the test of time (so far).
22. How do I stop overthinking email marketing?
It’s hard. I could easily create emails for other clients, but it was difficult for my own business. I was closer to it. The emails had to be “perfect” (perfection doesn’t exist). Instead, write emails knowing that you WILL delete and change many of them in the future. As your email list grows and you realize what people need, you’ll make adjustments, delete some, and shift things around. Know you’ll make mistakes. Emphasize learning and data over perfection.
So there you have it, answers to the 22 most common questions about email marketing.