Hello and welcome to this CASE webinar. Ten Ways to Increase Your Email Open Rates. My name's Fiona Ross. I am Director of Development at Giggleswick School. I've been in development for about 15 years and I've worked for Russells Group University before moving into the school sector. So full disclosure, I am not a comms expert, but these are some of the things that help me and my team reach our audience and I hope they'll help you too. There are so many ways to communicate digitally these days and it's a really, really crowded space. Today we're going to focus on email and some tips to break through the noise. Now, whether that be from mass emails or for more personal messages, I make no apology. This is not rocket science. There is no magical way to make people read your emails, but please don't switch off. There are some tips that hopefully will help. So, number one, first and foremost, ask yourself, why am I sending this email? What is my purpose? And also, when you're doing that, is this the best vehicle to convey the information? Could it or should it be a social media post? Or is it part of a wider campaign? Then ask yourself, what do you want from your recipient? What's this for? Is this for information only? If it is, check your odds. Is it real? Is it real? Is it relevant? And this is advice I had got years and years ago. I can't remember where I'm from, but it's really helpful. This and it's really important because if it isn't any of these three things, then ask yourself, why am I sending it? There's an example on the screen here. This is a message we sent out from our global Community Connect, and it was a message about our recent ISI report. It's an inspection, a bit like an offset inspection. Thankfully, inspections don't happen all the time. So it is real and it's rare. OGE pride and potential recruitment make it relevant to the audience. In this instance, there's no specific call to action, but you may have a call to action in your email and be clear about what that is. And if you're making a group or personal call to action, are you making it easy for them to respond? And are you ready for the responses yourself? And if you are referencing someone in senior leadership, are they ready for responses to? Number two is probably one of the biggest things that we need to consider. So we'll spend a little bit more time on this. While 64% of people will open an email based on the subject line, 69% will make some based on it too. So first and foremost, you need to tell the reader what the message is all about. Keep it brief between 30 and 50 characters, according to a MailChimp study emails with 50 characters or less have a 12% higher email newsletter open rate and 75% higher click through rates than other emails use pre had to text. This maximizes the preview field in your email. It's like a subtitle so you can add more detail to increase your emails appeal before it's opened. And when sending personal or first emails, say what you want in the header. O.G. Capture alumni catch up, meet for a coffee. Can I ask your advice? Join us for an event. What's the date? What's the time? What's the location? Be specific. Be open. Be honest about your tie. Try not to be generic and if you're finding you aren't breaking through with a header. So, for example, you're cold emailing lots of new potential donors. Change the header, mix it up until you find something that works. Our system allows us to split massive emails into different into two groups so we can send the same message to two different groups with two different subject headers, which allows us to test different ways of heading up an email. Ironically, we don't seem to get much difference between the different studies that we choose in terms of open rates, but it's a useful tool to be able to have. So if we come back to our example, we actually sent out a few different messages to a few different audiences. Both of these messages are exactly the same apart from the photo, but they have different audiences and very different purposes. The one on the left with the genius school photo is essential. Parents after junior school and the one on the right is to our alumni, our community, and the tone of the header is based on the audience. So for the junior school parents, it's about recruitment. So the title is very formal and information based. Giggles White School AISI Report 2023. That's really important to parents. Quality of education is something that will be a high consideration when choosing a place for their child. For our alumni, where it's about engagement, we can be more informal, familiar, and we can engender a sense of pride in our community. We all knew we were excellent and now it's been proved. We want we know that we can have that slightly flip tone, but it's very informal and it will be appreciated. So number three, do send your emails from your own account. Most databases are pretty smart and will allow you to send an email from your own address. Ours also breaks massive emails into smaller chunks so it can chime for some of the spam filters, but some still London junk. And that's really a risk we can't take when we're communicating without VPNs. We find it far better to send them from our own accounts and then upload them later or helps to bypass filters. And also people get used to seeing your home address. They trust your own address. We also have headmaster at address. So if you want to use maximum impact, it often makes our alumni sit up when they think of getting an email from the headmaster, so it's potentially worth setting up by Vice-Chancellor at or something similar for your institution. And don't forget to then record it on your database afterwards. Number four, really simple. Send the send your message to multiple email addresses, particularly when you're getting started on the relationship. And this can be useful in a number of ways. Some people check different email accounts at different times of day, so you will check your business email address during the day and then perhaps when you switch off in the evening you'll switch over to your personal account. You may also find that your system has had another email address added to it and you're not quite sure which email to use. Whatever your reason, sending to multiple addresses will help you find the best route to communicate. Alarms will often tell you which email address to use, what their preferences and which not. And if they don't tell you, you can always ask. But make sure that you copy and paste when you have details and be nice to the police and other gatekeepers. Remember things that they tell you to do. You never know when you'll need their help and you can develop some really, really strong relationship with those that help you work with your your alumni. Number five timing. Send your emails at the right time. 23% of emails are opened within 60 minutes. But don't worry, there are some linger as you may not check out into your email until a day or two later. But when is the best time to send? It may be really obvious to say, but it's usually better to send your email out during the day time when people are awake, not asleep. Difficult though, when you're sending to multiple time zones. I appreciate that. Try and avoid email blasts on Mondays. People are already flooded with emails. Come in over the weekend and the first thing they do is they delete them. They delete massive amounts of emails on a monday morning. They're just skimming through. If they don't know you, if your subject, Heather, is a little bit vague or generic, you'll be deleted. We can also have low open rates as people tend to be busy with their personal lives. So that leaves you with Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. That traditionally been the favorite days to send emails. You avoid Monday angst and also Friday itchy feet. Although personally I find that on a Friday people are a little bit more on the slides the weekend and are a little bit more relaxed. So this is going to be something that you'll have to find out as you send your emails. But MailChimp confirms that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the most popular days to send email newsletters with regard to time. The debate is quite polarized. Some say eight or ten in the morning is best. We have found in our institution that 6 to 8 in the evening works best for us. But then we are talking about a community of OGs. We often have quite a lot of parents that receive our communiques. So sometime between tea time and kids, bedtime is actually quite good. The bottom line is test for your audience, check your stats and do what works for you. Number six, spam checks. Avoid spam traps. Don't use weird spacing, excessive punctuation caps, special fonts, anything like that in your emails because they will get picked up by spam filters, avoid spam trigger alerts and unlikely to use some of these that click here. 100% free will not believe your eyes. Another kind of click bait terms. So this you can see on the screen is our spam rating for the message we looked at earlier. And our system has an integrated spam checker, so it gives us an overall rating out of ten for every message that we send and we consider anything over eight to be good to go and it's a little bit more specific. You can click on some of these items to see more detail about what can be done to change the ratings. You see here, we're blacklisted on one list. My i.t team say i can't do anything about that, but 8.8 is a very healthy score. So that went out as normal. And you'll see from our stats which will come on to shortly and the number of replies that we actually have to the email that this email was clearly a winner. But do use a spam checker if you have one number seven. This is a really big one as well. Don't actually load your messages. Of course, the messages I've just shown you break most of the rules here with a massive photo and loads of written content. However, our system helps us to manage the size of the email and the embedded images, etc.. Also for us, some messages need to be long. Our alarms in particular, expect an address from the headmaster to be more than one paragraph long. They expect something lengthy, but when you consider other messages like introducing yourself to a prospective donor, however, you should keep it short and to the point. Again, what is it you want? What do you want them to do? What are you after? Don't send attachments and pictures in the first email if you need to add extra stuff using links to reasons, it reduces the size of the email, but also drive traffic to your website. But just don't make it overcomplicated. Keep it really simple, particularly for that first communication. Number eight is don't get obsessed with stats. Stats are important, but they're not the be all and end all and they don't always give you the full picture. As you saw at the beginning, some people only read what they can see in the reading pane and then they decide to flick through or they just move on. If you get your content right, you should be able to read the whole message in the reading pane. Click through and replies are much better measure of engagement and quality of your content than the actual read write, and they're much easier to track. And you can see here little example of stats. So this is the stats based on our example of our ISI report email. It went out to to just over two and a half thousand people and nothing bounced, which is incredible. And as well as the read write, which we get to, which is really good for us, over 1600 it takes into other accounts like it takes into account other things like flex reviews and other aspects to give us an approximate read rates of nearly 2000 rates, which is amazing. The click through, as you'll see here, aren't actually that high as the main link in the message was actually to another site where you could read the full ISI report. But we can still see that once people got onto off site, they hung around for a while and some even books on to an event, which is great. But you also can't see. Here is the number of replies we received from the quality of the replies we received. Most of those were to the headmaster to congratulate him on such a fabulous report, but we received a huge number of replies. This is pulling all these things together to know that you've sent a really good message. Number nine is don't be a pest. And this comes back to checking your hours. And this is so, so, so important. I once heard someone say that all engagement is good engagement. I actually disagree because if you do it badly or you do it too often, it can be a real turn off. Consider taking people out of your mass mailings, particularly some of your perspective donors. If you think the message is relevant, send it yourself. Don't just send news articles willy nilly. Some things that you've talked about with the person that you confident that they will find interesting. So don't just think, well, actually we're doing this piece of research and you'll definitely be interested in this even though you haven't spoken about it. If you bombard people, they will soon switch off. So even with if you're sending some of these information, any emails come back to, do you have a purpose in mind? Think about their response. You've sent me this. So what? What do you want? I'm just this nice to know, but I'm just going to delete it now move on or I'm busy. I don't have time to read this, so think about all of the things we've just talked about. Your purpose, your content, your timing, and just don't send too many messages. Finally, this is a really small tip, but one that's really, really important and can can really save you. Bacon We're all busy, we're all human and we all make mistakes. It may be a typo getting someone's name wrong, forwarding a thread when you only meant sent the last message. Whatever the mistake we all make them. Give yourself a break. There is a technique. Message records can be used, but they don't always work and the recipient often gets a notification which isn't ideal, instead sets a delay on all of your emails. It can be as long or short as you like. I have one set for 5 minutes so that if you do mess up and occasionally we all do, is much, much easier to correct the email, you can just pick it up before it even goes out. I haven't always had a delay. I once invited someone to an event with his wife. I need to realize moments later, after it's sent the email that they're divorced. Fortunately, he was lovely and when I apologized he saw the funny side. It's actually now a downer as well, which is really good result, but it doesn't always work out like that. So just that delay, give yourself peace of mind because you never know. You just might notice that little typo. Just as you press the button and your heart will sink. And that's it. There's no magic formula to make everybody open your emails. The digital world is a crowded space and it's so, so hard to stand out. And we haven't even touched on AI, but hopefully this has been useful. And if you have any questions, please do get in touch and thank you for watching.

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