How To Make People Open Your Emails (every time)

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Hey friends,

Writing your newsletter every single week is hard enough but if no one is reading it then you’re wasting all this time and effort.

The industry standard open rates are between 11% and 25% depending on the industry and yet, the best newsletters are constantly netting 40%+ open rates.

How?

Today, we’ll explore 5 tactics that will help you stay above the 40% mark and maximise the time and effort you spend on writing.

Start with your subject line

The most obvious advice is to optimize your subject lines.

And even though it’s obvious, I see way too many people spend all this time writing great newsletters and then slapping “whatever fits” subject line on top of it.

A trick that great YouTubers use is that they start working on their videos from the end of the process. That is, they start with a title and thumbnail.

After all, it’s these two elements that are going to determine whether someone’s going to watch your video. So why bother making great content if you’re not sure that it’s going to get views?

The same story applies to emails.

Apart from optimizing and tinkering with your subject lines, I recommend that you start the entire writing process with it.

Optimise the post-subscription flow

Low open rates are often caused by the fact that most people forget that they subscribed to your newsletter 5 minutes after doing so.

That’s why you need to make an impression in their inbox right after they join.

There are a couple of things you can do here:

1 - Ask them to complete the survey

This is not only going to get your subscribers activated right away but it’s also going to get you valuable data that you can later use to personalize their content.

2 - Have a double opt-in email

Ask them to confirm their subscription by clicking a button or a link in a confirmation email.

3 - Customize your welcome email and confirmation page

Most welcome emails and confirmation landing pages are boring. They have the same copy with no personality. Customize yours so they convey your branding and tone of voice. Make it an enjoyable experience for a newly subscribed person.

4 - Ask them to take action

Apart from completing a survey, those 5 minutes after people have joined your newsletter is when you have their entire attention.

You can use it to present an offer (paid or free) or ask them to take whatever action you want.

You can even combine that with the first tactic and present a different offer or a next-step action based on how they complete the survey.

Purge your list

Your open rates are a reflection of the health of your list.

You’ve probably tried many different tactics to grow your emails list.

Whatever you do, different tactics and sources are going to yield a different quality level of your subscribers. That’s why it’s so important to purge your list every now and then.

An easy way to do it is by adding every new subscriber to an automation and then delaying the next step by 30 to 180 days (depending on your preference and how strict you want to be).

After those 30 to 180 days, check whether they’ve opened any of your emails in the last 30 to 180 days. If not, have a short email campaign to reactivate them.

If you don’t want to remove your subscribers, create a different segment for them so you can identify both active and inactive subscribers.

Stay consistent

All these tricks won’t work if you send your newsletter whenever you feel like it.

A part of having high open rates is creating a habit of getting and opening your emails around the same time and day of the week.

If your readers can identify your logo and name and associate that with content they want to read - bang - you’ve got what it takes to have 40%+ open rates every time you hit send.

Content matters

You can scrap all the above if the content you send doesn’t provide value to your readers.

The first time a new subscriber opens your newsletter is when they’re going to decide whether they’re going to open your next email.

You can have the best post-subscription flow and use your finest copywriting to optimize your subject line BUT if your content is nice-to-have rather than I-crave-your-advice in the eye’s of your readers… you’re going to have a hard time convincing them to open your emails every week.

Of course, it doesn’t mean you have to be an expert on the subject in hopes of making great returns for your readers.

But your content needs to be valuable.

You could be an expert who shares their own advice but you could also be a guide who curates content from the web. The point is to provide the value that you promised you’d provide back when they subscribed for the first time.

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Other resources to help you grow your newsletter

Dan Ni of TLDR on Curating the Paper of Record for Tech (link)

Dan Ni, CEO of TLDR Newsletter, a leading modern media company that operates 10 curated newsletters with over 8 million readers, joins Erik Torenberg to talk about the success of TLDR. Some very interesting insights on TLDR’s growth and how they approach launching new content formats.

Creator Growth Summit (link)

Beehiiv hosted a Creator Growth Summit, an online event with live sessions from folks like Joey Justice (Dan Koe’s team), Yannick from Hypefury, and Ben Harris from Clickfunnels. You can watch the recording of that entire event on X.

I grew one of my local newsletter to 1,000 in the last 30 days. Here are a couple of (universal) things I learned that you can apply to your newsletter as well 👇

Thanks for tuning into today’s issue of the Newsletter Navigator!

If you’re ready to launch or grow your newsletter, reply “newsletter” and we can start a conversation to see if we can help you achieve your newsletter goals 🙌

See you next week!

-Jakub