Increase Your Email Open Rate With These 4 Tips | Flodesk Tutorial

Of all the marketing strategies available to online entrepreneurs, email marketing has some of the highest conversion rates. However, all of that is contingent on people actually opening your emails and taking action. In this post, I'm going to show you a simple way to increase your open rate on your emails sent using Flodesk. Without further ado, let's hop in.

Hi, I'm LaShonda and I teach entrepreneurs how to grow a biz without breaking the bank but I also create content for other tech companies. I've been using Flodesk since day one and I'm currently featured as a Flodesk instructor within Flodesk University. So if you haven't checked that out, make sure that you click on this link. I also have a link that provides you with a free 30-day trial plus 50% off your first year of Flodesk. So if you'd like to give it a try after watching this tutorial, visit lashondabrown.com/flodesk.

The top four things that will impact your open rate are verifying your domain, cleaning your list, your email content, and your subject line. There are great articles on the Flodesk Blog about improving your subject lines. I want to hop over to the computer and show you how I consistently get at least a 30% open rate on my emails. So I had a little fun geek-out moment. I typed in how to verify your domain in Flodesk and obviously, a help article showed up first from the Flodesk website, but as you can see, my tutorial on how to authenticate your domain to increase your views actually showed up with the video section of the Google search. So that was just a fun little moment for me. I’ve linked that video here as well. But we're going to go ahead and open up the Flodesk help article. So if you have not verified your domain in Flodesk, you want to make sure that you do that. Adding your DNS records to your domain to authenticate it is really vital to help your deliverability. So what I mean by that is when you are sending emails through an email marketing software, you have to have a professional email. So that's the term you'll see a lot online. A professional email is simply a term@adomain that you own. So if you are say for instance sending things from newsletter@flodesk.com, when you authenticate your domain, you're saying I own flodesk.com so this is proof I will put the records on my account and it will ping my account to prove that I own the domain and thus have the ability to email from that email address. So it's really easy to do if you have never done it, you can go to this help article and it's going to show you step by step how to do that.

All you need to do is select your domain provider and then it's going to tell you exactly what to copy and paste within your domain provider in order for the connection to work. So this is a step that a lot of people who are not website savvy skip when they're setting up their Flodesk account. This impacts the performance of your emails and this is something that will take you just a few minutes to do and it will automatically help push your emails in front of more people. So if you've not verified your domain again, this help article is great, and also I have a step-by-step tutorial showing you how to do it as well.

Cleaning your list is super vital when you are using email marketing software. I did a video called Organizing your Flodesk account. Here’s a link directly to this section in the video. But what you want to do on a regular basis, you can do it monthly or quarterly, is you want to sort your list and remove people who have unsubscribed, bounced, or marked your emails as spam. Now in regards to the spam thing, I really want to draw your attention to this, if you are sending your mass emails from the primary email address for your organization. So again, if we say your emails are being sent from lashonda@flodesk.com for instance. If you were to get marked as spam by that person, any email that you send from lashonda@flodesk.com would end up in their spam folder. So this has actually happened to some friends of mine. They have had email subscribers mark their emails as spam and then they never received any emails from that person again, including ones sent directly through Gmail. So I would recommend creating an email address specifically for your newsletters. It doesn't have to be newsletters at whatever your domain is but something separate from your main email. So if people mark that email address as spam, you still have the ability to contact them later. Sometimes people just mark emails as spam instead of going through the hassle of hitting unsubscribe. And so it's not personal, but this is a common thing that happens. So if you want to bypass that, create a separate email address you can upload to Flodesk and send your newsletters from an email address. It is not the primary email for your organization.

The last thing that so many people do not take into account, is you need to create emails that people actually want to read. And I know that sounds silly but to be honest with you, this is what my very first Flodesk Bootstrap Blast looked like. And at the time, I had 721 subscribers and my open rate was 23.6% with a click rate of 2.9. And so at the end of the day in hindsight when I look at this email versus what I do now, the number one thing that has changed with my email content is the fact that I have turned my emails into a resource. What I mean by that is your email if it is something that people can refer to later, to help their business, to spark new ideas, to share with them promo codes then they will constantly open your emails because they know that there is value inside. So I strongly recommend not sending emails unless you have value to deliver. I don't care if people have told you just email every week or email every month. It's not about the consistency of your email. It's about the quality of the content. So if you look at this email in comparison to what I'm sending now, you can see a variety of options here that provide value.

So one of the things that I would do, is I would recap what I posted on Instagram as a reel. This helped to increase the visibility of my Instagram content, but I also gave people the strategy behind what I did and the information about the trending audio. So if they wanted to use that trending audio to create their own content, I made it super easy for them to do that. Then I got in the habit of sharing a resource of the week. This was a great way for me to stay on top of promotions with partners and also drive traffic to my affiliate links. At the very top, I would give some type of intro into why I created the YouTube video of the week, then share the YouTube video. When you look at this email in comparison to how I started, love that soft, sage gray color palette, but this is very me Lashonda Brown and brown buttons and brown thumbnails and vibrant colors and fun graphics. It's very easy to read and it’s broken up with plenty of photos. And then at the very bottom, this is what I included and I would encourage you to figure out what is the equivalent of this in your business.

Did you find this info? I don't currently sell products but if you’d like to support me, consider buying me a coffee as a thank you. It's a great way to keep me caffeinated and creative in 2022. I’d also love to hear your comments about how you use my Biz Advice so feel free to share that as well. Until next time ta ta for now. Lashonda and then a button to my Buy Me A Coffee Page. So when you dump all of that valuable content in your emails, you are also creating an ecosystem to drive traffic to ways that people can support your brand. Not everyone has a buy me a coffee page. You guys know I love that system but just think about hey, if you found value with this email, could you leave a review on my podcast, could you leave a review of my business on Google, could you fill in the blank for whatever works well for your brand, but that sign off for your emails is a great place to put a call to action to help drive traffic somewhere else. So if you are taking the time to put in beautiful graphics and add different colors throughout your email, you may want to think about what if people want to say thank you for receiving this information, what would the best thank you be for my brand? So I will tell you when I sent this email about being frustrated with Instagram, it converted really well. If you look at the email reports, the open rate is 42%.

So going from 23% to 42%, what happened over time, is I found my rhythm. Even the way that I wrote the email changed. When you look at this one it's like hi I'm taking you behind the scenes. I created a strategy to help our clients, happy list building. Very impersonal. But look at how I’m writing now. Anyone else sick of Instagram updates? Lots of people are flocking to Tik Tok out of frustration with Instagram but I went to LinkedIn instead. I mean, what a way to kick off an email. You are talking about a pain point. You're talking about another solution that people are implementing and then you're throwing in a curveball saying, but I'm not doing that. So when you start that email out with something to pique curiosity, and then you promote your YouTube content or whatever it is for your, people are going to be way more likely to take action and this video has performed so well on my channel. So I don't want you to second guess the power of turning your emails into resources. When you create emails that are valuable to your list, your list will open your emails. You do not have to sell in every single email. Provide value so that when you sell, people open the email to see the sale. But if all you're doing is promoting things for people to buy, and you're never providing value, what you're going to do is see a decrease in your sales and a decrease in your open rate. 

I hope this gets your mind flowing with ideas of things that you can do to spice up your emails. Pay attention to emails that you receive from other brands that you find valuable because when you do that and you take their inspiration and make it your own. You can revitalize your entire approach to email marketing simply by looking at what you respond to and implementing it for your own brand. I hope you found this information useful. Flodesk charges a flat rate no matter how big your list becomes. So you're not penalized for growing your list. They also have beautiful templates and incredible features on the way that are going to help you generate passive income in your business. So if you'd like to give Flodesk a try feel free to use my link to poke around for 30 days for free. And until next time, ta ta for now.