To make your emails more engaging, stop addressing your entire list. Instead, picture one specific, real person—a friend, an ideal client, or someone you admire—and write directly to them. This simple mental shift transforms your tone from a generic broadcast into an intimate, compelling conversation.
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Counterintuitively, highly formatted and image-heavy emails can feel corporate and impersonal, decreasing engagement. Shifting to a simpler, plain-text style mimics a personal message from a friend, which increases perceived authenticity and encourages more replies and genuine connection.
From Nov 20th to Dec 20th, sending a personal letter-style email from a founder or executive to unengaged contacts can increase open rates by 40%. The key is changing the "from name" to a person, not the brand, and using a subject line that acknowledges their absence. This strategy works for both B2B and B2C brands.
Personalization is not one-size-fits-all. Director-level and above prospects are 50% more likely to respond to company-level relevance (e.g., business initiatives). In contrast, individual contributors and managers are more receptive to individual-level personalization.
Combine two specific audience identifiers in your subject line, like role and company attribute ("Mid-market CMOs") or interest and a pain point ("Beauty fans with sensitive skin"). This "double personalization" tactic reportedly increases B2B open rates by 24% and B2C by 29% by making the message feel hyper-relevant.
Focusing on email open rates can lead to clickbait subject lines and weak copy. Instead, orient your entire outreach strategy around getting a reply. This forces you to write more personalized, engaging content that addresses the recipient's specific pain points, leading to actual conversations, not just vanity metrics.
Stop trying to convert customers directly within an email. An email's primary function is to provide enough evidence and intrigue to earn a click through to a dedicated sales page. The sales page, not the email, is responsible for the final conversion. This shift makes copy more conversational and less pushy.
Prompting subscribers with simple, non-work-related questions (e.g., "What's your favorite holiday cookie?") encourages replies. This builds a conversational relationship, improves engagement signals, and positively impacts email deliverability and open rates.
Leverage AI in email marketing not to replace your voice, but to augment it. Use tools like ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner to generate angles and outlines. This frees up your creative energy to focus on infusing the content with personal stories and genuine connection that only a human can provide.
Beyond marketing metrics, actively soliciting replies on non-business topics (e.g., "What's your favorite hobby?") uncovers valuable first-party data about your audience's interests. This enables more relatable and personalized content that resonates on a human level.
Shift your primary success metric from passive opens to active replies. A reply signifies a genuine two-way conversation and a much deeper level of engagement. Actively inviting responses in your emails transforms a broadcast into a powerful relationship-building tool and provides invaluable audience feedback.