10 Ways to Get Your Email Opened

With 89 billion business emails sent each day, it’s tough to guarantee that any one email gets read—even one that has great content like yours. What’s a music retailer to do? At the 2014 NAMM Show, small-business guru Barry Moltz offered 10 ideas to help music stores stand out and ensure their emails get seen. Here are those 10 tips. Also, check out the video of the session for more specifics.

1. The title of the email.
“My most popular email from last year was, ‘My wife thinks I’m having an affair,’” Moltz said. “That was the title.

“The punchline to this was, ‘My wife thinks I’m having an affair,’ and you opened it up, and it said, ‘With my business.’ Because, guess what? I’m at work all the time. Given that my brand is to get small businesses unstuck, this worked out really, really well for me.”

2. Go negative.
“If you use words like, ‘Here’s the worst. Absolutely. Wrong. No fewer’—any negative words will get the [email] opened more than it won’t.”

3. Be exclusive.
“People want to be part of a club. People want to think that they have exclusive access or, guess what, they’re getting a deal that no one else is able to get.”

4. No capital letters, ever.
“It is like screaming, right? And the other thing is a lot of it’s going to go into spam.”

5. Be controversial or contrarian within your brand.
“What kind of thing could you be doing where you take the contrarian view?”

6. Avoid certain words.
Moltz suggested avoiding such words as “free,” “help” and “percentage off.” They’re overused.

7. Use odd numbers and the number 10.
“The numbers that work are 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 21.

“Ten is the only even number that works.”

8. Keep it short.
“You have to keep it to 25 characters because over 50 percent of the people that are going to open up your email are opening up from some kind of mobile device.”

9. Get help.
“There’s a great tool called tweakyourbiz.com. What’s really cool about it is you put in what you want your title to be, and then it gives you dozens of titles that really will work.”

10. Never send an email that is from just your company.
​“That doesn’t work. People do business with people they know, like and trust."