Tip: Your email open rate depends on your ability to convey your email's value at a glance. Don't just rely on your subject line for this — seal the deal with custom preheaders.
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Email preheaders are previews displayed after a subject line. They directly impact open rates, giving an average boost of 7%. And they're particularly important on mobile.
Yet, preheaders are rarely customized. In fact, MailerLite found that only 10% of their customers' email campaigns used custom preheaders, which meant that the rest would have simply displayed the first sentence or two of the message.
If you want to display something more enticing, add custom preheader text through your email marketing platform. Or you can add it to the HTML yourself.
When putting together your preheader, consider giving an overview of the content, elaborating on the subject line, teasing an incentive, or making it personalized. And keep it right around 50 characters.
The first step is to recognize a good problem when you see one.
A good problem is one that many people have, otherwise you won't have enough customers. For indie hackers, this number doesn't need to be too big. Usually a few hundred thousand is enough. In some cases, much less.
You want these to be people you genuinely like talking to, because they'll be your customers for years. And ideally you have the same problem as them, too, so you can empathize with what they're going through.
Tip: Readers often unsubscribe from all of a sender's emails when they're really only trying to avoid a specific type of email. Keep your readers on your list by letting them choose what they want to receive.
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Giving readers the ability to manage their subscriptions can dramatically cut down unsubscribes and spam reports, while increasing reader satisfaction and helping with segmentation. Yet, many creators don't allow their readers to select what types of emails they want.
Consider creating a preference center for your readers. At a minimum, this means allowing users to selectively opt out of specific email types when unsubscribing, instead of automatically removing them from all emails.
Tip: Associating your brand with an emoji through repetitive use can have an impact that would make Pavlov proud. "Own" an emoji to stay top-of-mind with your audience.
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If you strategically own a specific emoji, you'll come to mind whenever your audience sees it. It's free and easy promotion. Take Morning Brew. They associated their brand with the coffee mug emoji over time.
And it's no coincidence that Ross Simmonds, for instance, automatically assumed that a new follower with a coffee cup emoji in their name was a Morning Brew employee.