Do you remember middle school? My biggest memory of that time is going to school dances and waiting for someone to ask me to dance. I’m probably giving away my age here a bit. When I was in middle school, you just didn’t go dance, you had to wait for a boy to ask you.

Most of them really didn’t want to be there, much less ask any of the girls on to the dance floor, so we waited… and waited… and most of us never were picked.

I used to wonder if my email messages felt like that sometimes. I would spend a lot of time crafting the perfect message, but nobody would ever open them! What a waste. Over the years, I made peace with the fact that a 20-30% open rate is actually good in most industries AND through some experimentation, learned a few tricks to increase my open rate. As more people opened my emails, more people signed up for webinars and in the end, more people bought programs. Even a small increase at the beginning of your funnel can make a big difference in your business?

Want me to share my tips for increasing your open rate? OK, here goes…

Your subject line is key. Even the most finely crafted email won’t help you, if it isn’t opened. You should be spending as much time on the headline as the rest of the message. For more hints on headlines, check out our latest solo biz hack – Headline Headstarts.

Keep track. Ideally, you would be split testing your messages (this week’s solo biz hack shows you how). But, that can be overwhelming at the beginning. Instead, make a simple spreadsheet of subject, time sent, list sent to. See which headlines and which times of the day do the best.

Focus on the From. People tend to open emails that come from real people. Even if the return address needs to be clientcare@XXXXXX.com – have the from address be from a person -or from a person at a company (example: meredith @ Time Traders.

If you’ve got something cool inside let people know. People are more likely to open emails with [PDF] or [VIDEO] because they know there is something valuable inside.

Want even more tips? Check out this week’s Solo Biz Hack.

To your business success,