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We started writing better subject lines.

Then we made email content that delivered on the promise of the subject line.

We started thinking about emails like they were social posts.

And we scrubbed our email list.

Those changes took us from a 4% to almost a 30% open rate.

Around 100,000 people were reading the emails we sent.

But it got really hard to continually produce interesting emails and subject lines.

Every week started taking longer and longer to make a good email.

Then I decided to try something new.

We would tell stories in the emails.

First we told the story of how we started our company.

I thought it might be 3 or 4 emails long. But the story turned into over a year of weekly emails.

And it was really popular.

Our open rates got up to 35% and stayed there as customers kept tuning in to figure out what happened next.

We didn't try to sell anything with the story emails.

There was no call to action.

There was no buy now link.

But we sold way more posters with a story email than a sales email.

We also started getting responses from customers.

The vast majority were positive.

Occasionally we did get a "why are you sending me this" response.

But that is ok.

You'll never satisfy everyone.

Once we ran out of runway on the story of how we started our company, we needed a new subject for our stories.

So we started writing about "Poster Worthy People."

Each week we pick a lessor known person from history and write an email about them.

These stories did even better than the story of how we started the company.

And we also discovered a way to expand the stories past our email list.

We'll cover that in the next post.

You can learn more about PostRabbit here, check our prices, or contact us with any questions.

Or continue to part 6.

We started trying to engage customers with our emails.

We wanted customers to click and we wanted them to respond.

This tells the big inboxes that your emails are wanted.

Our open rates were climbing.

But to get them even higher, we had to do something counter-intuative.

We needed to scrub our list.

List scrubbing is when you remove the emails that aren't engaging from your list.

When I first heard about this concept, I thought it was stupid.

Why would I want to remove any email from my list?

So what if they haven't opened an email in over a year.

One day they might.

But there is a cost to sending emails to people that don't read them.

And when you send an email to a person who isn't interested, you send a signal to email providers that your email isn't good.

When the email providers think your email isn't good, it ends up in the spam folder.

So we removed all the emails from our list that hadn't opened an email in the last year.

Our list size dropped by 10%.

But our engagement rates shot up.

And overall, more total emails were opened even though our list was smaller.

This change in approach helped us get our average open rates to over 25%.

We were now consistantly getting our message to our customers.

But there was one last change we made that pushed us up over 30%.

We'll cover that in the next post.

You can learn more about PostRabbit here, check our prices, or contact us with any questions.

Or continue to part 5.

We were on a roll.

Our email open rates were climbing.

We started by making interesting subject lines.

And we made good content to deliver on the appeal of the subject.

But we still could not break a 20% open rate.

Then I learned something important.

The major inboxes evaluate your emails.

And they evaluate how users interact with your emails.

If everyone ignores your email, you'll start ending up in the spam folder.

But if your email gets opened, clicked, and responded to, it will go to the inbox.

An email is not much different than a social media post.

You want engagement.

The first email we sent for the purpose of engagement was a success.

The subject line was "Thank you."

In the email I wrote an honest thank you letter to our customers for supporting our small business.

The open rate for that email was 25%.

We got a ton of positive responses from our customers.

And the open rate of every email that followed was boosted.

We continued to seek engagement.

We would run contests to get a free product and all you had to do to enter was reply to our email.

Our open rate kept climbing.

But to get to the next level, we needed to do some cleaning.

I'll cover that in the next post.

You can learn more about PostRabbit here, check our prices, or contact us with any questions.

Or continue to part 4.

The open rate on our emails was low.

I was on a mission to improve it.

I started by trying to make more interesting content in the email.

But making better email content barely made a difference.

I was getting frustrated, so I decided to try something off the wall.

I made an email with the subject line "Bad Guys Love These Decals"

And in the email I explained various ways bad guys might use perforated decals while doing crimes.

This email was our first to break a 10% open rate.

I was on to something.

But then I immediately took it too far.

The next email we did had the subject line "PosterBurner Has a Crime Problem"

I went on to explain that it was a crime that people were paying more for posters at other companies.

This subject line worked really well.

It was our most opened email at the time.

But it was a click bait subject line and the content of the email didn't deliver.

So we ended up getting alot of angry responses and alot of optouts.

But in the course of one month, we had taken our open rate from 4% to 17% and we were starting to figure it out.

The subject line is the most important part of your email.

But the content of the email needs to deliver on the promise of the subject line.

For the next few months we slowly improved our open rates by creating more interesting subject lines and doing our best to deliver email content that matched.

In the next post, I'll write about how we took the next big jump by changing the way we thought about inboxes.

You can learn more about PostRabbit here, check our prices, or contact us with any questions.

Or continue to part 3.

I was trying to improve our sales from email blasts.

So I ordered an eye patch.

Like this.

I ordered an eye patch because I read in some marketing book that things like eye patches pull people's attention.

I put on the eye patch and took a picture holding our product.

I put that picture in the next email.

And it didn't work.

At this time our open rate for email blasts was about 4%.

I didn't even know that was bad.

But I did know that we had to get better at email marketing.

The price for adwords just keeps going up.

The price for social ads keeps going up.

We needed to figure out a way to generate sales that didn't cost a fortune.

Getting better at email marketing was our only option.

I just didn't know how to do it.

It took two years of trial and error but we got our open rates to over 35%.

And we've kept them there.

This series will cover exactly what we did to take our open rate from 4% to 35%.

It was not a direct path.

And we made some mistakes along the way.

But the lessons we learned are applicable for every business.

Starting Point

In the beginning, our open rates were so low because we didn't put any time into making emails.

We were busy.

There's alot of stuff you have to do to keep a business running.

Our business was printing posters, canvas prints, decals, and things like that.

So every two weeks we'd come up with a sale like "20% Off Posters Today."

And that did work for a while.

But after seeing the same type of email over and over again, people started ignoring them.

And when people ignore your emails, they stop showing up in inboxes.

Your customers are constantly telling gmail, hotmail, and all the email providers whether you are worthy of getting into inboxes.

Sending boring emails over and over eventually leads to poor delivery rates.

And that is why we started at a 4% open rate.

In the next post, I'll write about what we found was the most important part of improving delivery rate.

You can learn more about PostRabbit here, check our prices, or contact us with any questions.

Or continue to part 2.