The email marketing principles we use to build lists with 70%-plus open rates

Small business owners’ email inboxes are overwhelming; why should they open your marketing emails?

At Inkwell, we build email marketing lists for projects like startup competition The Pitch, which has a 73% open rate and a 40% click-through rate.

Our strategy is built around four pillars: value, personalisation, content and list health. It’s what we used to increase our client UKBF’s newsletter traffic to their website by 102% in the first six months of the retainer.

Here’s a closer look at all four of our strategy pillars, and practical examples of how we implement them to get great results.

Communicate your value

You’re probably building an email list because you want to nurture potential customers. Keeping up with updates about your product or getting a special offer is a reason to subscribe, but not a great one.

Wanting to subscribe to your emails isn’t the default position for most potential subscribers, so you get them to sign up by communicating the value you have to offer. Why should small business owners care about your emails? What’s the USP that they’re going to keep opening them for?

For The Pitch, we treat our email signup form like a product page. It’s got our value statement at the top, then below the form, more about the competition and testimonials from founders. We’ve seen a dramatic impact on conversions since changing to this layout – because we’re demonstrating the value.

Subscribers also need to see the added value for themselves. Make sure you have enough quality content or new opportunities to support the frequency of your emails. It’s better to send fewer, amazing emails than to sweat your content too much and not provide enough value.

A big opportunity to grow your subscriber list is to demonstrate value early in the journey. This can be done a couple of ways:

• Offering something of value for signing up, like capturing an email address in return for a free PDF download.

• Signing up subscribers at the same time as they buy event tickets. On Eventbrite, we regularly see about half the people who buy tickets to our events also subscribe to our general newsletter.

Personalise every email

Personalisation is your biggest opportunity to increase open rates. It helps build relationships and assure people the content is valuable. 

Every email should have basic personalisation built in (likely the subscriber’s name and company), but the more personalisation you can do, the better. Just don’t be invasive or collect data you won’t use – keep it relevant and useful.

We collect audience data for The Pitch during the application process, where people also opt-in. Then we use Zapier to create new subscribers and Mailchimp merge tags to personalise the emails. 

If you don’t have complete data for everyone on your list, replace the default merge tag with something that fills the gap so you can still use personalisation. For example, the default for first name could be ‘there’, so the greeting is ‘Hi there’ if you don’t have that data, or you could use ‘your company’ as the default company name.

Segmentation is a powerful way to personalise your emails further, and it’s not as time-consuming as you might think. Simply split your audience into a small number of distinct groups, and replicate a master version of the email you’ll be sending that many times, changing the language and content to better match that audience.

For example, The Pitch sponsor Studio Graphene ran free one-on-one sessions to help founders with their development challenges. We targeted founders based on business type, competition stage and challenges. The campaign had a 77% open rate and a 34% click-through rate, generating useful conversations with some of the UK’s most exciting startups.

Perfect your content

Our approach to email content is simple: consider your competitors and aim to be 30% better. In my experience, 60-70% of email newsletters for small businesses look the same, so a little extra effort to look different gives you the edge when people are quickly filtering through their emails.

Can you stylise your text? How can you use your brand colour palette? Do you have original images that you can use across your content, not just in emails? We use images of our Pitch participants or pictures from our events wherever we can; you want to represent your audience in your content as much as possible. 

Similarly, consider all possible ways to refine your copy so it conveys value and entertains. Does your subject line cleanly tell subscribers why they should open your email? Can you get more creative with your call to action buttons than just ‘subscribe’ or ‘read more’? 

Keep your list clean

The first thing we do when we start working with a client is to clean their email list, making sure everyone we send to has the potential to open the email and click on links. 

It’s common to think your subscriber list should be as long as possible, and to avoid unsubscribing or archiving people. However, there are plenty of possible reasons that certain subscribers aren’t opening your emails, which might mean they’re better off unsubscribed.

Before unsubscribing, consider a re-engagement campaign. When we run these for clients, we focus on the FOMO: what they’ll be missing by not being subscribed. And remember to give them enough time to come back. I usually advise that if someone hasn’t engaged with the last 20 to 30 sends, depending on frequency, they can go.

After you’ve cleaned your list, refine your onboarding journey to improve the quality of new subscribers. What can you do to really bring them into the community and show the value of your emails? 

I recommend setting a trigger whereby if they get through the whole onboarding journey without engaging, they are automatically unsubscribed, so you don’t end up with more unengaged subscribers on your newly-polished list.

Inkwell helps clients reach and connect with business owners through educational content. Want to find out more? Get in touch with the team today.