Using Foreshadowing To Improve Your Email Open Rates

Email marketing is a great way to make a living online. It can help you sell more of your own products, or those you are an affiliate for. It can also help you get more traffic to your blog and thus improve your advertising income. In other words, email marketing is an important cornerstone of any online business.

The first and most important goal anytime you send an email out to your list is to get your subscribers to open that email. There’s a lot you can do to make that happen from ensuring email deliverability to writing killer subject lines. Today I want to talk to you about something else you can do to improve your mail open rates – foreshadowing.

You may be more familiar with the term when used in books or movies. Game of Thrones for example is famous for the frequent use of foreshadowing. The basic idea is that there are hints about what’s to come in future chapters, episodes, movies etc. For email marketing we’re using the same idea.

With foreshadowing in email marking you want to tease and create interest for the next email in the one your subscribers are reading right now. Let’s run through an example. Let’s say we’re writing a series of emails about improving email marketing. In today’s email we worked on mapping out the topics of the emails we’re going to write. Towards the end of that email we may mention that the next step is to start writing those emails, beginning with the subject line. We then also tell our readers that we’ll cover writing highly converting subject lines in the next email and that they should look for it in 2 days.

There are a couple of things going on here that help with the open rate of that coming email. By using foreshadowing, we’re creating interest and getting the reader curious about what’s next. If I’m new to email marketing, or trying to get better at it, learning how to write better subject lines is something I’m very interested in. By also sharing with readers when to expect the email, we’re setting expectations. That makes it easy for the reader to keep an eye out for the email. If he knows when it should be coming, he’ll be less likely to miss it.

That one little paragraph in one email helps make sure the next email will get opened. Of course you can then continue to use the idea of foreshadowing with each subsequent email. Keep hinting at what’s coming next. Not only will it help with open rates, your subscribers are also less likely to unsubscribe. They may not have been super interested in the topic of today’s email, but what’s to come may grab their attention and keep them on your list.

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