What would happen if you started measuring the health of your marketing emails on replies?
*gasp* I know conversion, open rates, and clickthroughs matter a lot. And I know the next thing you're thinking— Sarah, if people reply to my emails, I HAVE TO WRITE BACK. And yep, that's part of it.
Just hear me out for a sec.
Email is (or... was) designed to be a tool for conversations. It's one of the reasons ISPs (the major email providers like Gmail and Outlook) care so much about measuring your email engagement. If people regularly open, click on, and reply to your emails it tells the ISPs that your subscribers are engaging with your content and you're more likely to have a high sender score and end up in their inbox. If you want to dive deeper, we wrote more on deliverability here.
If your customers don't open, click on, or reply to your emails, you're more likely to end up in the email marketer's purgatory: spam. So email engagement matters *a lot*.
So why not optimize for open rates? That’s engagement, right?
You should track open rates and work to improve them. But with changes in privacy, open rate as a metric is becoming less and less reliable. Apple recently introduced Mail Privacy Protection to Apple Mail. It's a security feature that allows users to choose if they want to share data with email service providers. And 97% of them don't.
So my open rates will be artificially lower?
No...
Apple is going to automatically load the code that tells your email tool someone opened your email— even if they didn't. So that means your open rates will be artificially inflated.
See the issue?
Now, back to optimizing for replies.
Replying to an email from a company is a rare and valuable form of engagement, which is great for getting your emails into your customer's inboxes. But let's be honest, usually, the content from a marketing email isn't good enough to warrant a conversation.
But if you decide you want to write the kind of email that elicits a response, the way you approach your marketing email changes.
1. Conversational: Your customer has to believe you are a real person and not some marketing team of a faceless company. The email comes from your real name, and the replies go directly to you.
And yes, that means you have to reply to your customers, which takes time. But in the process, you'll gain rich insights into how they think, what they care about, and how you can market to them better.
2. Personal: An email optimized for replies should be written in second person narration, speaking directly to your customer. Third-person narration is cold and corporate. The email now has "you" language, and the customer feels like you're speaking directly to them.
3. Focused on the customer: No one replies to emails that have nothing to do with what they need or care about, so now you're focused on empathizing with the customer and writing them something that matters to their life.
4. Curious: A good reply email actually asks for the customer to reply. And that means it's inherently curious about what the customer thinks and feels.
Even if you work for a big corporate business that can't ask for a reply (I get it, this isn't for everyone) just try writing with this lens and see how it changes your engagement metrics.
Give it a shot and reply here to let me know what you learn so we can jam on it. I'd love to give you a shoutout in another edition of The Grow Op.
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