Email Marketing – The Number One Tip

By guest blogger, Wendy Bryant.

What’s the most important part of e-mail marketing? How do you grab someone’s attention before they hit the delete key? Why choose e-mail to get your message out there? E-mail marketing drives traffic to your website. The two main objectives with e-mail marketing are traffic generation and converting website visitors into customers, traffic conversion. E-mail marketing helps you keep customers in a very cost effective way as well as get in front of new ones. Having your website live isn’t enough. You have to promote it and remind people that you’re there. Email is immediate; it’s in your face.  Companies now are trending towards email more and more—it creates buzz, acquires and retains customers, reinforces branding and provides customer service all at the same time.  More importantly for marketers it is measurable and you’ll know how effective your campaign was with click-thru-rates (CTR) and open rates. Many e-mail services will provide you with real-time results that export to a report with graphs and charts. A well thought out e-mail campaign can make you a star, with high CTRs and measurable results your boss will be happy but, more importantly your customers will look for that next email and wonder what message will your company be sending next.

The biggest mistake you can make is not putting in the necessary time—just because it’s e-mail doesn’t mean your campaign doesn’t demand time. It actually demands more time because it takes only seconds for someone to read the subject line and hit the delete button. So what’s the most important part of your message? You guessed it….the subject line Tip #1 Subject Line – You’ve got about 15-30 seconds to grab your recipient’s attention and this is where it happens.

60% of recipients delete an e-mail based on the subject line.  The subject line must be beg to be opened—it has to be compelling.  Your copy should be not exceed 40-50 characters. Think of email copy as advertising copy—you need to put yourself in the mindset of the customer. Why do I care? You’re taking up my time, why am I reading this?  Your goal is to appear friendly and personal without being too intrusive. I typically create 30 to 40 subject lines for each campaign. Give yourself time to craft a compelling subject line.

I find that brainstorming and writing subject lines happens over the course of a few days or longer. I write as many as I can put it away and look at them the next day, write more and repeat the process. I sometimes get ideas when I’m driving or not in my office so I record those and then look at all my ideas. I then start eliminating ones until I have my best three. I’ll alternate these subject lines as I’m testing a campaign to see which ones work better. The best test is to e-mail yourself the subject line and for that matter the entire email once the copy is finalized. You’ll know immediately if you would open the email upon receiving it.