INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Julian Shapiro
Contributor
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Julian Shapiro is the founder of
BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional
He also writes at Julian.com.
More posts by this contributor
How to get your ads working, and whether PR is worth it
How to
work with top influencers and avoid ad blockers
We&ve aggregated the world best growth marketers into one community
Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.
This is how you&re
going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can''t get elsewhere.
Our community consists of 600 startup founders
paired with VP of growth from later-stage companies
We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow,
Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo, and Ritual .
You can participate in our community by
joining Demand Curve marketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program
See past growth reports here and here.
Without further ado, onto the advice.
How can you send email campaigns that get opened by 100% of
your mailing list?
Based on insights from Nick Selman, Fletcher Richman of Halp, and Wes Wagner.
First, a few obvious pieces of advice for
avoiding low open rates:
Avoid spam filters by avoiding keywords commonly used in spam emails.
Consider using email subjects (1) that are
clearly descriptive and (2) look like they were written by a friend
Then A/B your top choices.
Include the recipient name in your email body
This signals to spam filters that you do in fact know the recipient.
Now, for the real advice: Let say 60% of your audience opens your
mailing, how can you get the remaining 40% to open and read it too?
First, wait 2 weeks to give everyone a chance to open the initial
email.
Next, export a list of those who haven''t opened
Mailchimp lets you do this.
Important note: The reason many recipients don''t open your email is because it was sent to Spam, it was buried
in Promotions, or it was insta-deleted because it looked like spam (but wasn''t)
The goal here is to resuscitate these people
You have two options for doing so:
(1) Duplicate the initial email then selectively re-send it to non-openers
This time, use a new subject (try a new hook) and downgrade the email to plain text: remove images and link tracking
De-enriching the email in this way can help bypass spam filters and the Promotions tab.
(2) Alternatively, export your list of non-openers
to a third-party email tool like Mailshake (or Mixmax).
First, connect Mailshake to a new Gmail account on your company domain.
Next,
configure Mailshake to automatically dole out small batches of emails on a daily schedule
Let it churn through non-openers slowly so that Gmail doesn''t flag your account as a spammer.
Emails sent through Mailshake are more likely
to get opened than emails sent through Mailchimp
Why? Mailshake sends emails through your Gmail account, and Gmail-to-Gmail emails have a greater chance of bypassing Spam and Promotions
folders, particularly if the sender doesn''t have a history of its emails being marked as spam.
