A Surprising Way To Get Your Email Opened By Investors – Info Entrepreneurship

Investors are inundated with emails clogging their inbox more than you’d believe. Being disarmed upfront and knowing just exactly how much time they will lose (or gain) by opening your email is extremely helpful. This is why including a read time above the fold will influence investors to start opening, reading and potentially responding to your emails.

As a society, our attention spans are shortening with an infinite number of options to choose from and it’s impacting business. Given your audience is short on time, adding read times to your subject line will dramatically improve your open rate.

Read times are something you might be already familiar with on popular news websites. Read times are a growing component of publication platforms — because they work. Read time is based on the average reading speed of an adult which is approximately 275 words per minute. Take the total word count of a post and translate it into minutes. Read times are displayed next to the story header and the time people spend reading stories is integral to their experience.

How likely are you to read an article with a 20 minute read time compared to one with a 3 minute read time? Most people would choose the latter. The same can be said for emails. LoanWell, a Durham-based startup that helps you create friends and family loans online and repay them with auto-draft, recently sent an investor update included with a read time in the subject line. Co-Founder, Justin Straight, shared his insights into why they chose this approach:

“My thought was everyone is super busy and in the vein of assuming the best — they really want to track with us. Ultimately they don’t have more than 1 min each month and probably have 5 mins every quarter if they have not heard from us during that time. We had more updates to share but thought it was best to keep it short and not confuse the call to action.”

Keeping it short and to the point will have a beneficial effect on open rate. In LoanWell’s case, it worked notably well. They had their second highest open rate with this eNewsletter at 61.1%.

Of course, some people will make the argument that investors will open/reply if they genuinely care about you and want to help. Your startup also needs to be worth promoting. But unless you’ve actually met the investor before or have a warm introduction, it’s pretty difficult to get their attention. Things that prevent someone from giving full attention to something else are especially compounded in ones inbox.

There are a variety of ways to improve your open rate and adding a read time is just one of them. However, it does add another level of measurement by creating an engaging subject line and testing which read time gives you the most optimal performance. But what investors really want is for you to give them their time back.