Improve Your Email Open Rate (Part 5)

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.