💡 Want to Increase Your Email Open Rates? Do this...

TLDR:

Use your customer’s first name when sending messages via email, mail, chat, or SMS. This will likely increase your open rates because people are interested and get curious when they hear or read something that has their name in it. Also, it gives your communication a personal touch.

Before: "You cannot miss this crazy deal" - Good headline
After: "Rachel, you cannot miss this crazy deal" - Better headline

✍️ This might be your favorite word in the whole world

You are at a party having an immersive talk with a friend. His story has your full attention. It’s so engaging that everything else is oblivious to you. But suddenly, you hear someone saying your name behind across the room. You didn’t catch exactly what they said but now you start wondering why your name came up in that conversation. Now, your focus shifted completely from your friend’s story to the other random conversation just because someone mentioned your favorite word. Your first name!

🧠 To influence someone, you have to get their attention first

In a real-life experiment, the Behavioral Insights Team proved that including the first name in an SMS requesting the payment of a fine led to an increase in response rates. In the control group, with a message without the first name, responses were 23%. However, the same message with the addition of the recipient’s first name, resulted in a response rate of 33%! A 10 percentage point increase by adding just a word. Not bad, right? 😎 

However, another study showed that this effect was present, but only when the sender used the people’s first name and NOT their first and last name. In this scenario, no significant change was observed.

These findings suggest that should start using the first name of your customers every time you can! On your website, if require your customers to fill in their data when they make a purchase, send a contact request, or sign up for your newsletter, you should start asking for their first name. Then you can include it in your email marketing campaigns with a simple HTML command and probably increase your open and response rates.

_{PS: I would have also done it for my newsletter but the platform I used doesn’t allow you to have that field in the signup form. Already sent feedback to the product team haha} 😅 

💡A YouTuber I follow implements it in every email

Virtually every email he sends me includes my first name in the first line of the message and sometimes he goes even further to include my name in the subject line. Of course, this draws my attention directly to that email instead of the other dozens of “more boring” emails I have in my inbox. It also feels way more personal than a standard email. I feel more “special” and probably your customers would too.

But also big companies like PayPal are using this tactic. This is a notification email for a payment I got from a friend. But PayPal also uses this when sending me information about new T&Cs or new logins from new devices. Again, it feels more personal.

✅ Start asking for your customer’s first name if you haven’t already

Actually, it’s quite easy to implement. You either have already the data you need to begin sending more personalized emails, or you can add an extra field in your sign-up forms on your website or ads.

So whatever email marketing or SMS service you use for sending your campaigns, they will most likely have a “command” to include the first name of your customers. Most of the time it looks like this:

“Hey {first-name}, now you can discover the newest feature of our product!”

Easy as that! Just look in the FAQs or for a tutorial on YouTube and you’ll be able to set it up in minutes.

📖 Further information for you to dive deeper

• The Small Big - Steve J. Martin, Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini

• The Behavioral Insights Team - Experiment with the SMS

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Thanks so much for reading,

Juan Diego

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Please use these insights & knowledge ethically and with respect.