Category Archives: Email Marketing

Email marketing posts show you how to build your email list, and starting email marketing campaigns without your own list. There are details on some common errors, what you can do to avoid them, and how to fix  mistakes you’ve already made.

There are also posts on how to measure your email marketing results, and what metrics really matter. You may think the list size is the most important thing (but it isn’t).  Getting a high rate of unsubscribes, bounces, and spam reports? Find out what to do about it.

Find out what your response rate should be and how yours compares to your industry counterparts.

Plus, posts on easy ways to improve your email design to improve readability and increase your click through rates (a metric that does matter).  There are also posts with tips on how to write subject lines that sell. Since the subject line is the first thing your readers will see, it’s important to get that right!

How to Write Email Subject Lines That Get Opened

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headlines

Library of Congress via Flickr

An email subject line is like the headline in an ad. It’s the first thing you notice – and the most important part of the entire message. It’s even more critical with email than with an ad.

If someone sees your ad, they may miss or ignore the headline, but be attracted by a photo or a sub-head.

With email, everything else is largely hidden.

If the subject line doesn’t say “open me!,” you’re sunk.

A writing tip from David Ogilvy

Whether in print or online, spend most of your time on your headline. To quote David Ogilvy (who never saw an email but knew a few things about headlines):

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar. -David Ogilvy

Good, bad, and ugly subject lines

Here are some sample email subject lines:

Stocks Set to Rebound After Yesterday’s Fall

The problem with this headline is that it tells you the entire story. There’s no need to click and read the entire email. I already know the market went down yesterday, and the headline tells me that they are expected to rise today.

Here’s another take on that same headline:

The Five Stocks That Survived The Market Slide

If the stock market has been sinking, knowing which stocks have retained their value is useful and important information.  Where do I click?

Or, what about this one:

Spark Business with Webinars, Podcasts, and Online Video

Looks like the email is about different ways to market your business.  All good tactics.  The trouble isn’t with the content.  The trouble is that they’ve given away the entire strategy in the subject line.  There’s really no need to read further.  OK, I can use these tools to promote myself, one, two, three, check.  Done.

What if we changed this a bit.  Make the headline say something like,

How to Spark More Business

With that headline,  you won’t know what the tools are unless you open the email.

Here’s another one:

5 Ways to Break the Rules of Email Marketing

It promises I can break some rules, but there’s absolutely no way to tell what I’ll gain by doing it. I also can’t tell whether the rules are legitimate or foolish.  What if, instead, the headline made a promise about how I can be more successful by breaking the rules.  Say something like:

Profit From Breaking Email Marketing Rules – 100% Legal!

Makes you wonder what the rules are, how you can make money, and reassures you that it’s legal (you’re not spamming anyone).  The contradiction between doing something that sounds dodgy, and knowing that it’s perfectly legal gets your attention. You now want to open that email to find out exactly what you need to do to increase your profits.

In each case, the new subject lines work because they engage emotions, tell a story, or promise one.  You can do this by arousing curiosity, creating a mystery, setting up a contradiction, or promising useful information. And that’s why emails with these subject lines get opened.

Got a favorite email subject line? Or a question about writing them?  Ask in the comments.

 

A Powerful Little Email Marketing Tool That’s Often Overlooked

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postscript, one more thingThere’s a little email marketing tool that people often forget about.  Many marketing posts tend to focus on writing the perfect headline, finding the right image for your post, and how to structure your offer.

But there’s another, humble tool, that’s less flashy than a great headline or a photo or an offer, but a tool that can have a big impact on your marketing results.

It’s the P.S.

Why use a P.S. in your email marketing

It may seem like an afterthought, but the P.S. is the second place most people look at a letter or email (the first is the return address on a physical letter or the sender in an email).  With all those eyeballs going to that spot, it’s important to use that attention to your advantage.  It works on physical letters, emails, and landing pages.  People look at the headline, scan the photos, and then check the P.S.

Your offer: miniaturized

It’s a mini-summary of your marketing: your offer, an important reason to buy quickly, or another benefit of using the product.  It’s the chance to add an extra little push. focus attention, and tell readers to go  back and look at the rest of the page.

The fifth “P”

It’s sometimes called “the fifth P” (after Promise, Picture, Proof, and Push).  Marketers selling to other marketers sometimes treat it ironically (here’s that P.S. again, you know the one where we promise to make you better looking, taller, and increase your IQ to genius levels), but it still works.  If you’re pitching to a more button-down audience, play it straight.

P.S. Just one more thing (no, I couldn’t resist, could I) … I wonder if that’s why Steve Jobs did that at the end of Apple presentations.

P.P.S. I was reminded while looking for an image for this post that TV cop Lieutenant Columbo used to do the same thing.. and he always solved the case!

Image: flutterby

How Big Should Your Mailing List Be?

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Postmaster General James A. Farley During Nati...

Image by Smithsonian Institution via Flickr

How big should your mailing list  be? What’s the best list size? 100 names? 1,000? 10,000? More? By list I mean email, Twitter followers, or even (gasp) snail mail.

Someone was asking the other day whether theirs was large enough. And if people would buy things from a free email newsletter.

The answer is that they will buy. Not all of them, but they will, as long as two things happen.  One, you have been sending them relevant, useful information and two, whatever you’re offering for sale in your newsletter is also relevant and useful to them. If your newsletter is all about gardening tips, you’re not likely to sell your subscribers on a set of dental tools (no matter how good a deal they are).

How big should your mailing list be?

There is no perfect list size.  There is a right size for your needs, your market, and your industry.  That just means that your list has to be big enough and responsive enough to support your marketing goals.

If your response rate is low, your list will have to be larger; if it’s high, you can get away with a smaller list and still get the same return.

There are three things (primarily) that affect the response you get.

List cleanliness

Is your list up-to-date?

Long ago, I worked for a company that hadn’t cleaned their list in a very long time. When they finally decided to do something, the guy they hired called me (I was marketing manager at the time) and said, “You have to come see this.” He took me into a room that was about 10 x 6 feet (roughly 3 x 2 meters). It was FULL of returned mail. They were mailing to companies that had closed, people who had left, and people who were deceased. Big waste of time and money!

If it’s an email list, and you’re using  an email service provider (such as AWeber or MailChimp), most of this gets taken care of automagically. New signups are added, and unsubscribers are removed. You’ll still need to check for other things, such as opens and bounce rate.

If you’ve got a snail mail list, when something comes back, go update your list (or get someone else to do it). Don’t wait until the returned mail piles up! And don’t waste your money mailing to dead people.

Think less about size and more about responsiveness, relevance, and permission. Those aren’t size measures, they’re quality measures, which is what really matters, not absolute size.

Responsiveness

Some people are buyers, some are not. You can have people who are just at the beginning of looking for something (doing research on a new washing machine, for instance), or people who are ready to buy (my washing machine is broken, I need a new one).

Look to see who’s buying (and who isn’t)— and what they buy.  If you see certain people are buying lots of  gardening tools from your home improvement site start a separate gardening tools list. If you have a separate business that sells dental instruments, don’t try to sell them to your garden lovers.

Relevance

See my gardening comment. The important thing isn’t the size of the list as much as how relevant your information is to your subscribers’ needs. If you’ve got a list of 2,000 rabid, raving medieval jousting fans, they will want armor, lances, helmets, and banners. And they will want all of it. Find those people (that tribe of 2,000) and they will buy and buy and buy from you.

Permission

Your list will do better, regardless of size, if you only add people who want to be added.  Use double opt-in (meaning that subscribing requires two steps, signing up and confirming that sign up).  Don’t add people who you met at conferences, or who attended events where you spoke, unless they request it.

I just unsubscribed from an event invite service.  A newsletter I do subscribe to used this service to create an event that I attended.  That invite service kept the names and started spamming me with more (unwanted) invitations.

When you’re building your mailing list, concentrate on relevance, cleanliness, and, permission, and responsiveness—not size.  Bragging about a list of 150,000 people is fun—but  that list is useless if 95% of them never open your emails or half your messages bounce.

What Do Email Lists Have in Common With Bank Vaults?

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The door to the walk-in vault in the Winona Sa...

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When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously replied, ‘That’s where the money is.”

Direct marketers have been saying essentially the same thing for years. “The money is in the list.” For a while, many on the internet (including me, I’m embarrassed to say) got caught up in RSS feeds and subscriber numbers. Wrong.

The money is in the list

Turns out that your email list is more profitable than your RSS feed. And, since Google shut down its RSS reader, and WordPress updates broke RSS plugins, it’s getting harder to even retrieve an RSS feed.

People who are willing to let you into their mailbox  trust you more than those who check your RSS feed. And that trust will eventually translate regular readers, followers. and subscribers into buyers.

Email has the best ROI

Campaign Monitor reports that email earns $38 for every dollar spent.  It’s far more effective than Facebook or Twitter too. Not to mention that you can target your audience more effectively, break it up into segments, and even split test headlines or other message components to see what’s most effective.

Talk to the right people

You can run ads on TV on all day about your pig chow, but if the ads are only seen by people who live in large cities, your sales will be dismal. The same thing will happen if you try to convince a web developer to buy heavy duty shipping supplies and packaging. Wrong audience=lousy results.

Know your tribe

Who are your fish? What kind of people need what you offer? What drives them nuts? Are you solving a problem they have?  Or is your product a solution without a problem?  Market to those people (and only those people). Farmers whose pigs have poor appetites (is there such a thing?).

Choose wisely

If you run an ad, rent a list, post on Facebook, or use Google – choose wisely. The cheapest option isn’t the best option. The best option is the one with people who most closely fit your tribe, your ideal customer, and the people (or businesses) with a problem that your product or service solves.

Just don’t rob any banks. They don’t like it.

What Email Response Rate Will You Get?

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The Crystal Ball

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If I ever write a book on email marketing and email response rates (oh, wait I did, ahem, another book) it might be called “It depends.”

What’s a good email response rate?

It depends.

How many people will click?

It depends.

How many people will open it?

It depends.

Same for pop-up conversion, signups to newsletters, direct mail, AdWords….

It depends.

There are many variables that can affect your email response rate: the list quality, the offer, the bounce rate, deliverability, copy, call to action, time of day, day of the week, how often you email, your industry, and many other factors.

Out of these, the three with the biggest impact are:

Your email marketing list

The quality of the  list you use is the single biggest factor, whether you are using email, snail mail, advertising on TV, or putting an ad in a magazine.  There are several factors to consider when choosing an outside list, or sending an email using your own in-house list.

First, how clean is it?  Have you updated the list regularly?  That means removing addresses that regularly bounce, people who have unsubscribed, or people who simply haven’t open your emails in a while (say six months  to a year).

Second, how well do the names on that list fit your ideal customer profile?  Are they the right demographic?  Does everyone on your list have an interest in this particular offer? Or, would it be better to send it to only a portion of your list?

Third, is it your own list? Or a list you rented elsewhere?  Your own list should get better results.

The offer

Is your offer any good? An offer doesn’t necessarily have to be a “sale” or a discount.  It can be a free ebook, a paid consultation, or an app.  It’s simply whatever the person responding gets in return for a response.

How well does your offer fit your target audience? Does it solve a big problem that they have?

Is the offer free free? Or is it paid?  How expensive is it?  Free offers will generally get a higher response rate, than something that costs money.  And, the more expensive, the lower the response rate (but possibly the higher the revenue).

Is the offer exclusive or new?  Or is it something that is common everywhere?  New, limited edition, or exclusive products will attract more people, more interest, and get higher response rates.

The creative

By creative, I mean everything the person reading your email sees.  That includes the words, the typeface, the layout, the subject line, any photos or illustrations, buttons, button text, and the call to action.  Changing the colors, altering the text on the buttons, testing subject lines, or from lines, and switching your calls to action can all have an effect on your response rates.  Which will work best will also depend on your audience and your particular products and industries.

A few general rules for improving the response rate from your creative:

  • Make the call to action buttons a different color than the rest of the website.  This will help them stand out.
  • Use ‘you” and “your” more frequently than “me”, “my” or “our”
  • The “from” line should come from a real person
  • Send any questions or replies to a monitored email box (and answer them)

Every time you send an email, track it, monitor the results, and analyze what happened.  Did emails sent on Tuesday do better than those sent on Monday?  Did you get more replies when you changed your offer to $5 off instead of 10% off? How many bounces did you get?  If your audience is big enough, test your copy and offers on a small portion of your list to see which does better. Once you have results, send the winning option to the rest of your list.