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How to Improve Email Response By 4200%

Author: Charlie Cook   |   November 10th, 2009

Do you use email to market your business? Have you ever been frustrated by the lack of response. You write your email, send it out and then… nothing happens.

This past week in my MasterMind Group, Jay wanted to know how he could get a better response with his emails. He wanted to know how he could get more people to take action and contact him and take him up on his offers.

What was even more frustrating for Jay, was that some of his emails were only getting a .05% response rate. In other words, only 1 out of 200 people who read his emails actually responded, called him or went to the sales page or optin offer he wanted them to use.

But Jay also had gotten a much better response with some of his other emails. In some cases 21% of the people responded.

What was the big difference? Why were some of his emails getting a response rate that was 4200% better than others?

Find the answers here >>

If you’re thinking it was the subject line that would be a good guess. The subject line is the first bottleneck to getting your emails opened. A boring or off target subject line pretty much guaranteed your email won’t get opened or read.

In Jay’s case, that wasn’t the problem. He was getting a 30-40% open rate, which is excellent. His email subject lines were clearly working.

I asked Jay to pick a couple of the emails that weren’t working, ones that got the lowest response rate. Then I asked him to pick out a couple that he knew according his Aweber statistics, people were responding to, ones where people were taking the action he wanted them to take. And I asked him to post them on the MasterMind Group member blog for discussion during our twice a month calls.

The next day, I got an excited email from Jay. Just by doing the above exercise, he’d figured out the problem. When he looked at his best and worst performing emails side by side the problem and the solution jumped out at him.

What was the big difference? What as causing 42 times as many people to respond to his emails

They include a CALL TO ACTION!

No call to action in your emails, no response.

If you want people to take action, you need to tell them what to do.

Will any call to action work?

In some of Jay’s emails he was getting a 3% response rate, far better than .5%. These included a call to action, but it was something like, “If you’d like more information on … please call me at …”

Why wasn’t this type of call to action working?

1. Too General
If you want your prospect to do something, you need to make your call to action specific. General calls to action rarely get results.

2. Too Big

Getting someone to read your emails requires that they make only a minor commitment. Getting them to call you requires that they figure out what they are going to say to you and also how they are going to answer your questions. It’s a relatively big commitment. Or asking them to jump from your email to spending money requires a big leap on the readers’ part.

If you want your readers to take action, leverage the content in your email. If you just presented 3 ways to cut heating costs, make the call to action a simple extension of your train of thought. For example, “Discover all 25 ways to save money on your heating bill this year >>”

And then take them to a sales page for your $29 video course that can save them thousands a year.

The simple secret to effective calls to action are:

1. Make them the logical conclusion to the ideas you’ve been sharing, of the problem/ solution you’ve detailed

2. Use baby steps to move your readers forward.

This is what Jay did in the emails where he was getting a 21% response rate from readers. He included a simple call to action that leveraged the ideas he’d just shared in his email.

Want to get a better response with your emails >>

A 21% response rate to an email is good. And Jay was getting this with just one call to action in each email.

Depending on your list size, freshness, the frequency with which you mail, the number of calls to action in each email, you may be able to do even better, getting up to a 33% response rate.

The key is to do what Jay did. Track your open rates, track your response rates and compare what’s working with what isn’t.

Discover how to improve the response you get to your emails by 4200% or more. Get the details here >>

You’d be amazed at how big a difference a few small changes to your emails can make to your response rate and your profits.

Charlie

P.S. I’d like to share my top 4 performing emails with you. The ones that typically generate tens of thousands of dollars in sales each time I use them. To get access >>

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