Easy Tips to Increase Your Newsletter Open Rates
Hey there, Travel Creator! Today, we're shifting focus just a little bit. We're jumping into how you can increase your email newsletter open rates. This is dedicated to the creators who already have a newsletter and are looking for some tips on how to up their game. Even if you haven't started a newsletter yet, but you know you need to, you can still learn a lot about the strategy and good newsletter practices. For context here, I started my newsletter, The Content Compass, in August 2023. Each week, I highlight a travel creator who is crushing their content, and I share how you can take what they've learned and apply it to your own content.
If you want to join that free community, you can do so here. After starting my newsletter in August 2023, I was averaging open rates of 45%. But then in December 2023, just a few months later, I was averaging open rates of 58%.
Increasing your Open Rates
If your open rates are not where you'd like them to be right now, that's okay. And just so you know, MailChimp tells us that the average open rate for travel creators in their newsletters is 20%, so keep that in mind. The first piece of advice I have to increase your open rates is to make sure your content is divided into sections.
I talk more about these sections in Episode 2 of my podcast, so if you want more info on those, you can go head on over there. I recommend keeping your newsletter between four to five skimmable sections. My own newsletter I have between two and three. By skimmable, I mean it should not take your reader more than five minutes reading time to consume your content.
But imagine, each of the people who open your newsletter are giving you five minutes of their time. That is crazy to think about. If everyone who opened it scheduled a meeting with you, your day would be full.
When you're creating your newsletter, this is one of those instances where it's okay to assume that your readers are low on time. When you're sitting down to write those sections, keep in mind that people subscribe to your newsletter because they want to hear from you. So don't be afraid to get a little personal, share some details.
People want content that makes them feel like they know you and that they are in the passenger seat of your life. And before we get too far, I have a free summarized PDF of all these tips I'm about to share. If you want to easily apply any of this to your own newsletter, that PDF will be in the show notes of podcast five for you.
The Importance of Editing your Newsletter
This next tip to increase your email open rates goes hand in hand with the first one. It is to edit, edit, edit. Try to keep your newsletter between 600 to 800 words. I see a lot of newsletters come into my inbox that have four to five sections, which is great, but they are so long. I feel like I'm scrolling forever.
If you're feeling stuck trying to manage cutting down content in your newsletter, think about the newsletters you subscribe to and open, what do you love about them? What are they doing that you can shift to work for your own content? And when you're editing, if you think it's too long, it probably is. As Pascal first said, if I had more time, it would have been shorter.
I feel like he would have been a really good content developer, but we lost him to STEM- probably for the best. Keep this quote in mind when you're editing. I think about it a lot, and I think it can help you realize what you can actually eliminate in your newsletter. But seriously, taking the time to make my own newsletter shorter has helped me become a better content developer.
This has forced me to only keep the important bits. Because I know I'm writing for an audience that doesn't have any time. And it's already overwhelming, so I have to make sure every word counts.
Be Strategic with Sending your Newsletter
My next tip is to be strategic when you choose to send your newsletter. I know that kind of sounds obvious, but there's actually more thought that goes into it than you might realize. The annoying answer of when I should send my newsletter is that it depends. It depends on your own schedule, and it depends if you have something to sell or not.
I've noticed that the more you send something, the higher chance people are going to ignore it. It feels counterintuitive, but it's kind of like commercials. You know they're coming, so you're just going to ignore them or mute or just choose a behavior that allows you to not see them. But you know yourself.
Are you a person who does better with tasks that happen once a month or once a week? Do you actually have the capacity to sit down once a week to write something for your audience? Or is this going to work better for you to do monthly? Do you even like writing? If writing isn't your thing, don't force it.
Your audience will be able to see right through it, unfortunately. This is where content repurposing can become so handy. For example, let's say that when you're brainstorming content, you might always think about on screen text for a reel first, like your brain goes to reel forward first, and that is great. That's how my brain works as well.
When you repurpose your content, you can go back to your content repurposing sheet that I talked about in episode two of my podcast, and pull pieces from that reel or that on screen text that you have already wrote about and edit it into your newsletter. It basically makes it a lot easier to write your newsletter.
You're already starting with content that you've already created. For creators who are just starting out in newsletter creation, I recommend you send your newsletter bi-weekly or twice a month. And since you're just starting, it's less likely you'll give up on the consistency of sending your newsletter since you have a little more time between your sends than if you were to send it every week.
Switching Up Newsletter Sending Cadence
Another thing to keep in mind is that if you are selling a product or service, your newsletter cadence might look different and that's okay. You might have sales emails coming out on top of your newsletter, you might just sell in your newsletter, so make sure to be strategic, remember your newsletter.
When you're sharing a new product with your community, don't forget about it. I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but people expect to see sales and promotions in their email inbox. They do not expect to see it on social media. They want to be entertained so your newsletter might actually be the perfect place to sell your new offer.
So just keep that in mind when you have a new product or service to offer. You can also go back to your content repurposing sheet and pull some of that content that you have created to sell your product and service on social media and edit it for your newsletter. Anyway, back to the extra tips I have for creators.
Avoiding Clickbait in Subject Lines and Using A/B
You should also make sure your subject lines aren't clickbait. It is annoying and it breaks trust. Your subject lines should be creative, but they shouldn't lie. If you struggle writing subject lines, ask AI to help you.
That’s a great use of AI. You can even do “A/B” testing with your subject lines. This means that you can give the newsletter software that you use to send your newsletter to subject lines. So you can give it an A, and you can give it a B, and these two are different from each other. It will send a small portion of your email list the email with the A subject line and another small portion of your email list the email with the B subject line. Then it will run its numbers and it will determine which subject line got more opens. After that, it will send the email with the subject line that performed best to the rest of your list similar to subject lines as preview text.
This text should be completely different from your subject line. A pro tip here is to make this line really conversational and trail off, meaning let it get cut off by the email management system so that when someone gets it in their inbox, they can't read the full sentence. This should pull them in to open it so that they can read the rest of it.
I know you're a travel creator. You have like literally thousands of amazing photos, and I encourage you to please include those in your newsletter, but please don't include all of them, otherwise people will be scrolling forever and they likely won't open your newsletter again. And please don't make the photos the size of the entire content box of your email builder.
They do not need to be that big. Remember that you can and should link places in your newsletter where your subscribers can see more of your content and appreciate it fully. Go ahead and send them to your Instagram, your YouTube, your TikTok – whatever feels right for the content of your newsletter and your goals.
Preview your Content on Mobile
This next tip is skipped by way too many, and it is not previewing your content on mobile. I know that you know that so many people use email on their phones to read it, to read all their newsletters and everything. So we have to make it enjoyable for them. If your newsletter is long, it will appear especially long on mobile.
Spending a few minutes previewing what your content looks like on mobile can really be the difference between getting more opens and not. Nobody wants to read a newsletter that isn't formatted to their screen – it's not gonna happen.
Read Out Loud Before Sending
My last and most helpful tip is to read your content out loud to yourself before you hit send. This tip alone has seriously helped me become a better writer, not just on newsletters, but everywhere else my content shows up. When you do this, you can really pull out all the clunky bits where you are just saying too much, or maybe even repeating yourself. Be really specific and meticulous when you do this. Read each word rather than reading the full sentence.
This will help you cut down on any grammar or spelling errors that might have gotten in there. If you want to get all of this information summarized in a nice PDF you can easily apply to your own newsletter, you can grab that PDF for free in the show notes of my fifth podcast.
Let me know how it goes and send me a little message on Instagram or via email. And speaking of Instagram, if you would rather watch me talk through this series, I walk through all of everything that I just said in a few reels that you can watch on my Instagram. You can head over to @travelcontentwriting to check those out.
If you enjoyed these tips on how to increase your open rates, feel free to share it with a friend.