In this episode of BBTV, Christo shares a simple but powerful insight to help business owners improve their email open rates. After diving into years of data, the team discovered a recurring pattern that’s easy to implement and highly effective⚡

Key Highlights:
✅ Emails with the highest open rates all referenced time.
✅ Subject lines like “This month…”, “Join us Wednesday…” performed best.
✅ Referencing time creates urgency and makes the content feel relevant.
✅ Tip: Add time-based language to your subject line and first line.

Example:
Subject: “Doors close Friday” ⏰
First line: “Only 48 hours left—don’t miss out.”

Try it in your next send. ✉️
It’s a tiny shift that packs a punch—like adding a deadline to your call-to-action.

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Christo: If you would love to get higher open rates of your emails, here’s a good little tip for you. We analysed a few years worth of emails, and for us, that’s a lot of emails. We send a lot of communication to different segments of our audience, different markets, different customer bases for different offerings we have. So a lot of communication’s gone out.

So I had the team analyse around three years worth of emails to see were there any kind of recurring patterns or anything that you could recognise amongst the emails that got the highest open rates. So just look at all the emails that got the highest open rates. And let’s analyse the subject line and the first email. The first line, sorry, of the email. So the subject line, because people see it in their inbox, and the very first line of your email, people preview that as well in their inbox. So that’s what gets people to open the emails.

And funnily, the one thing that we recognise as a recurring pattern through most of the emails that had the highest open rates was that they referenced time in some way. So it would say something like, this is happening this month, or come and join us on Wednesday, or, you know, the first quarter, you know, this here’s something you’ve got to focus on this quarter, or here’s this quarter’s fashion or this quarter’s trends. So it’s something that referenced time. And we don’t know exactly why. Obviously we think it’s because it appears that there’s. It’s not just general information. If it’s general information, like how to reduce, you know, whatever, how to increase your responses from Facebook, whereas it’s general and you can look at it anytime where if it’s something that says this is happening next week, you feel like there’s a little bit of urgency, you better have a look at it because it’s going to kind of expire. So referencing time will get you higher open rates.

So if you want to get better responses from your email marketing, especially when you’re running promotions and things like that, make sure that the email subject line at least references time and creates that little bit of a feeling of a deadline that’s coming up.