What’s a Good Open Rate On Your Follow Up Emails

Igor: Hi, my name is Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the only podcast
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Welcome back to another edition of the list building lifestyle, with your
host, Igor Kheifets. I get this question a lot, people ask me, Igor, what’s
the ideal open rate and click through rate for my email followup? The
reason people ask is because it’s a controversial topic for some people. Some
people, who build like say, a customer list of a really expensive offer or an
item. They may achieve an open rate as high as 80% on their followup emails
because it’s a purchase, because it’s a big ticket, because obviously, they’re
going to look for that receipt if it’s two grand.

On the other hand, if you’re promoting your business opportunity for instance, and
you’re sending one dollar trial, your open rates are never going to be
as high as that. Does it mean that your list sucks and it’s crap and you should
trash it? No, it doesn’t have anything like that and truth be told, I’ve kind of
gone over the internet, I’ve scouted for information, I’ve read articles, I went
over the case metrics and pages and spots and etc.. I read all that stuff, there’s
no one definite answer to what the ideal open rate and what the ideal click
through rate is. The reason is because of course, every list is different but,
then, we still have to recognize the truth of the fact that there’s industry
averages.

Industry averages that can help us determine what the ideal open rate and CTR on
our emails are. But, what I want to do is, I want to share something that may not
even make a lot of sense to you right now but you will learn this to be true the
more you do email marketing. That is that judging your email quality or judging
your list quality purely based on your open rates is a big, big, big mistake. I
see people make this mistake all the time. They look at their open rates and not
their sales. They look at their open rates and not the actual response their
offers are getting. They look at their open rates and not the list size and
relative numbers to the entire business.

All they look for is that percentage. Oh, I want to get a 50% open rate on my
first email and what if I do double optimize? Will it increase the open rate,
etc.? They ask these sort of questions and these are not the right questions to
ask. The right questions to ask should lead you to basically getting an answer to
what sells better. How can I make more money? That’s the right question. That’s
the only guide, the only blip on the radar that should be guiding you when you’re
judging your emails. At best, open rates can be an indicator of interest.

I’ll give an example. About a month ago, we released a product, a guide, a system
if you will, to teach us how to build a perfect bridge page for promoting business
opportunities. It is a system I designed specifically for people that sell
products and programs that are not their own, either business opportunities or any
other sort of inter-marketing product, as affiliates where they sent people to a
sales feature that doesn’t feature themselves. I taught them how to put together a
bridge funnel. Very easy. No coding. Very easily done in a lazy afternoon that
gets them more sign-ups and increases conversions, etc. and if you’d
like to check it out, go to bridge.igorsoloads.com. When I was marketing, when I
was launching this to my list, I put it out there and I ran two subject lines in a
split test.

The first one generated a 30% open rate. The second one got me a 44% open rate,
which is about 50% more than the first one but, the first subject line generated
three times as many sales, which is what I needed to know to determine which one
is better. Now, why then you ask, people make such a big deal out of open rates.
Well, it’s because the same reason people make a big deal out of their hair cut.
It’s very easy to change, it’s very easy to spot, it’s very easy to notice. It’s
one of the first few thing you see when you review an online business and you
don’t need to be a super duper marketer to actually get a high open rate.

You can really just manipulate that stuff because people are emotional wrecks. You
can manipulate people to open your emails easily but can you get them to buy your
product? That’s the big question. If we are thinking about our open rates in that
context, it’s really important to remember that an open rate in and of itself is
not necessarily tell you about the quality of your list. It doesn’t tell you the
quality of your business. It doesn’t give you an indication as to how much money
you can make. I can tell you that I’ve recently done a webinar promotion with
Michael Cheney for example. Some of you may have even been on that webinar because
we had a good amount of people registered.

I ran the promo for the entire week. Michael was surprised how few people I got on
board. Compared to other JVs he worked with who had ginormous lists probably. He
said within the first mailing, they already had several hundred people registered.
This was not the case with me. With me, after the first mailing, I had about 60
people registered. Very few people. Having conducted the webinar, the engagement
was incredible. We had like a 60% show up rate. We had about 75% stick rate all
the way though the webinar. That’s unheard of. If you ever done webinars, you know
how incredibly powerful that is and that is really, really high and way higher
than other JVs that Michael worked with have been able to work with because the
way I am marketed to my list and the way I engaged my list was very different from
what they’ve done.

Me and Michael actually had, when we were going back and forth about this because
it was frustrating to him to see how stubborn I was about it. At the end of the
day, at the end of the day, I was driven by just one metric. Can I get engaged
people in that webinar? People who really fit to learn more about what Michael was
offering and the education he was providing prior to making an offer? That was my
concern. I feel I succeeded in that mission even though I probably got fewer
people on the webinar than some of the other high profile JVs but I assure my, my
conversions were spot on and that’s really the name of the game.

I don’t care how many people you get on the damn webinar. I don’t care how many
people you get to open the damn email. What matters is how many sales are you
making at the end of the day? How engaging are you to your audience? How relevant
are you to your audience? That’s really what you need to be concerning yourself
with and not just sitting there wondering, “Okay. What is the trick word? What’s
the magic word I need to use to get people to open more? What’s the perfect time
to email my list?” That’s another big one.

Honestly, there is no perfect time. There is no perfect time. I mean, people make
such a big deal out of it, Gif response even developed a feature to get people to
sign up with them and that is basically saying, “Look, we’ll throttle your emails
and we’ll test them out for a few days and we’ll see which time gets more opens
when you mail and based on that, we will basically throttle your emails for that
particular person or whatever,” or maybe it’s a feature where they analyze people
on your list because they’re on other lists as well and they see, what is
approximately the window of time that they open their emails and that’s when they
will throttle your emails to that person.

Well, I think it’s a very stupid thing to do. First off, people don’t always check
email all at the same time. It doesn’t matter what their time zone is. Second, I
may check emails from one person during the morning time and may check emails from
a bunch of other people during the evening time depending on the type of
correspondence that is coming in. Really, there’s so many variables that, going
off of what’s the perfect time to email your list is stupid. It is smart to just
play a different game.

When most marketers try to figure out okay, how do I get an extra 2% bump with my
open rates? Oh man, I only have a 20% open rate and that means my list sucks.
That’s where they put their attention. They’re really playing a really, really,
really small game. You could be playing a bigger game, a much more profitable
game, where you see the entire business and you’re optimized towards the sale and
not the higher open rate because, like I said, you can manipulate that thing easy.
All you have to do is either use click bait, promise lots and lots of benefits in
your subject lines even if you can’t deliver. Use trick subject lines such as
express delivery or something like that works really well.

You can get sneaky and you can even pretend that your email didn’t land or your
link was broken and you can send another email on top of the first one and get
away with it. Honestly, that’s not how you get ahead. It’s really not. The only
thing that I would recommend though, to get more opens, is to send to unopens. If
you’re using Gif response or Sendling or any I would say, modern day email
marketing software, it usually allows you to email the people who did not open.
Some software will even do it automatically for you.

I highly recommend, highly recommend reviewing the open rates up to 12 hours of
you sending out that email and resending to people who did not open with a brand
new subject line, brand new email body because if you send out the exact same
email what happens is, a lot of these email clients, they will put your content
into this little box and minimize it. That’s what Gmail does these days so it
basically won’t display the content and you don’t want that. You want all your
content displayed and for that, you need to write original content, not just the
same thing you sent out 12 hours ago.

Trust me, by sending out to unopens, you can actually double your open rates easy.
You could easily do that because these people have not opened your email yet. All
that’s going to happen is, you’re going to remind them to open. You’re going to
give them another reason to open. When you do that, you get so much more traffic.
You get so many eyeballs, you wouldn’t believe. If you’re not sending out to
unopens, you should definitely, definitely opened. You should not waste your time
trying to figure out a trick or the right word or the right time table on your
list on your CTR and to basically try to pull the highest possible open rate
because it’s not what it’s about.

Besides, let’s be realistic for a second, open rate depends on so much besides
your subject line. Think about it this way, first off, the IP that you’re on, on
the email optimizing software you’re using, if you’re an A-Webber and you’re in a
shared pool of IPs, your reputation, your IP reputation determines how likely you
are to inbox. If you’re in a bad shared IP pool, you could be writing the best
subject lines in the world, you could have the best customers in the world but you
won’t inbox and you will have a really low open rate.

Now, another thing to consider is the link you’re using. Sometimes, you’ll write a
great email to a great audience but you’ll use a link that’s been blacklisted by
ISPs or some barracuda blacklist and bam, you’re not inboxing. You’re not being
even visible to the people on your list. Now, another time, it could be something
to do with your from email. Another time it could be something to do with just the
system failing for the out responder company and they’re experiencing server
issues and they having to put you on a brand new IP that hasn’t been warmed up
yet.

There is just so many things that are outside of your locus of control that trying
to control them and trying to loose leaf over, “Oh, I’m not getting over 40% and
Igor’s getting 40% and that means my list sucks and oh my God.” You shouldn’t be
like that because it’s just something you can’t control. Instead, focus on just
getting people to act, to want to open your emails. Once you do that and the more
people get to act, the more people interact with you beyond the email to getting
your product, wanting to be friends with you on Facebook because they read your
email and so on and so forth, the better your business will be n then you’ll learn
this truth about inner market.

While everyone and their brother tries to sell you the idea that you need
thousands upon thousands of customers, the reality is that you can do really well
with just a handful of customers. You can do really well with just a couple
hundred customers that will supply you with the lifestyle of your dreams and with
the business of your dreams. You really do not need thousands of them, you just
need a couple of hundreds at most and you will make a great living and you will
have a great life and you will have tremendous pleasure and joy serving your
customers because, let’s face it, serving 2,000 customers is much more difficult
than serving 200 and that is more difficult than serving 20.

Your job is to find you a couple of hundred, build your tribe and not worry about
everyone else. Trust me. Everything else will fall into place on its own. This is
Igor, thank you so much for your time today. We answered the question; what’s the
ideal open rate and click through rate even though I didn’t give you any specific
open rate because it’s not what that’s all about, the philosophy’s different.
Still, I believe what you’ve discovered today will help you build a much more
powerful email marketing campaign. Stop losing sleep over your open rates and open
your eyes to the truth about how to make a great income with a small list.

This is Igor. Thank you so much for your time. Take care. Until next time we chat,
have a good one.

Thanks for listening to The List Building Lifestyle Show, make sure to
subscribe on iTunes or Google Play to never miss an episode because who knows just
one conversion tactic we share on the show might double your list and double your
business. Download the transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at
listbuilderslifestyleshow.com and don’t forget to claim your complimentary copy
of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival .
This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

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