Archive for September 11th, 2009
September 11th, 2009 | 
Author: Effective Email Marketing
Getting into your customers mailbox is pretty much the same as knocking on the door. You’re not in there yet!
It seems that one of the biggest problems people are having is getting their readers to OPEN the emails in the first place!
Truth is you can be promoting the best product in the WORLD and have the most enticing email copy possible but if you’re not writing compelling subject lines that get the emails opened all your hard work is lost…
So today I’d like to give you FIVE tips for writing effective email subject lines that can easily DOUBLE the open and clickthrough rates on your next email.
Tip 1: Use personalization for added attention
Ever been in a large crowd and you suddenly hear your name being called?
Even if you’re hundreds of miles away from home and it couldn’t possibly be someone calling you you still look up automatically without even thinking right?
Hearing your name instantly gets your attention!
Now imagine how much more powerful your emails could be if your customers could “hear” their names right in the subject line.
Sending out an email with a personalized subject line is the equivalent of calling someone’s name in a crowd: it has that same power to grab their attention.
So instead of a subject line that says something like:
“I have the information you’re looking for
… you could try something like this:
“Dave I have the information you’re looking for
Pretty simple right? But it really works!
In fact according to a recent report by MarketingSherpa by writing personalized subject lines that include the first name of your customers you can get almost TWICE as many people to open the email and click through to your offer.
And if you wanted to take personalization one step further consider adding another personal detail to the subject line like the city your customers live in you’d need to collect that data from them of course.
Start with a subject line that looks like this:
“Want to get out of the city this weekend?
… and then make it really compelling by adding personal details:
“Janet want to get out of Tucson this weekend?”
And the great thing is that as long as you’re collecting your visitors’ first names and any other data you think is useful there are plenty of tools out there you can use to automatically merge their names and personal details into your emails.
Tip 2: Keep your subject lines SHORT
Here’s a test: open up your email program and take a look at the subject lines in your inbox.
Are there any that stand out more than others? Any that you read first or get you interested in learning more?
Chances are it’s the shorter subject lines that grab you right?
It’s actually been proven that subject lines that are less than 35 characters had HIGHER opening and clickthrough rates than those with subject lines longer than 35 characters.
So keep it short and sweet! You don’t need to explain in detail what the email is about in the subject line you just need to give enough information to make people want to open the email to read more.
And if you REALLY want to increase your open and clickthrough rates make sure you put your benefit offer or most important element right at the beginning of the subject line.
That way if someone’s email program cuts off the end of the subject line which is pretty common you’ll still get your main point across.
Tip 3: Keep the formatting simple and understated
If you sent an email to a friend asking her if she wanted to shopping would you type your subject line like this:
Would You Like To Go Shopping On Saturday?
Or how about like this:
WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO SHOPPING ON SATURDAY?
It’s pretty unlikely right?
So why would your emails to your customers and subscribers have subject lines that were formatted like that?
The more your subject lines look like personal emails from friends family members or business associates the more likely it is that they’ll be opened. The more they look like spam the less effective they’ll be.
So avoid capitalizing each word or the entire subject line and avoid exclamation marks and dollar signs which can increase your chances of having your messages flagged as spam and will be sure to set off warning bells with your recipients.
Tip 4: Use a compelling “angle” to get your readers interested
Of course getting your readers to open your emails requires more than personalization and formatting. You’ll still need to come up with an interesting angle that grabs your customers’ attention and makes them WANT to open the email.
Here are some ideas for subject lines that we’ve had success with in the past:
- Make an announcement or share news: People want to be the first to find out new things especially if your site covers a specific industry.
- Make your reader curious: Make your reader curious about what’s in your email by suggesting they are missing out on an important offer or piece of information.
When you use this technique make sure you leave something to the imagination. For example: Paul are you making this common mistake? - Create a sense of urgency: Consider creating a sense of urgency in your subject line by limiting time Frank only three days left or quantity Mary only 250 copies available.
- Emphasize benefits: Another powerful approach for your subject line is to state how your readers will benefit from your email. If you can tell them how they’re going to save money save time make their lives easier etc by opening and reading your message you’ll have the most success.
Tip 5: Make sure your subject line relates to the content of the email
Nobody likes to be fooled or tricked and deception is the WRONG way to earn your customers’ trust and respect so make sure your subject line is related to your actual messages.
In fact it’s a legal requirement under the CANSPAM Act that the subject line be authentic and not misleading.
So if your subject line says Mary three ways to save money you need to make sure you actually are talking about that and preferably within the first few paragraphs. Otherwise your visitors will feel cheated and that will hurt your credibility.
By following these simple tips for writing and formatting the subject lines for your emails you should be able to increase your open rates and clickthrough rates by up to 50. And considering your optin list is where you’ll find your most valuable customers think how that could crank up your bottom line.
To your success
Gary Neame
About the writer: ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Internet marketer Gary Neame specializes in teaching real people how to successfully start build and grow their own profitable online businesses on small budgets. To get instant access to the stepbystep strategies tools and resources. visit: http://allaboutinternetmarketingtips.com
Fundamentals Of A Search Engine Friendly Website
There are several things that you can do to make your site “friendly” to the search engines especially Google.
First of all make effective use of your page’s title Meta Tag. Choose a title that reflects your business and includes 2 or 3 of your primary keywords. For example the title of our site is: “Custom website design for small business in London. Rural Web Design
This title has 5 of our most important keywords in it: Custom Website Design London and Business .
Another very important Meta Tag is the description The description tag shouldn’t contain just a list of key words. It should be a logical sentence that contains your keywords. Again we’ll use our description as an example: “Custom web site design and marketing from Rural Web Design in Cumbria
This description contains our primary keywords yet it reads like a coherent sentence.
In order to make it very easy for the search engine spiders to crawl your site if possible place links to all of your pages on your home page as well as every other page on your site. Also create a Site Map page and link to it directly from your home page. On your Site Map page place links to every other page in your website. This guarantees that every page on your website can be reached with a maximum of two mouse clicks or “link follows” by the spiders.
Near the top of your page you should use your primary keywords in an H1 header tag. Google gives extra weight to text located within header tags when computing PR. Also use a couple of H2 tags on your page because they count as well although not as much as the H1.
You can use ALT tags to describe your photos. If you can use a keyword or two in your ALT tag that is even better but be careful here that your ALT tag accurately describes the photo or Google may consider it to be SPAM which of course is not good.
Validate Your HTML Code. While the search engines don’t care whether your HTML code is errorfree they rely on the basic correctness of the code to find out which portions of your web page to index. If your HTML code contains errors it is possible that only portions of your web page are included in the search engine’s database. The errors while undetectable in a web browser may lead the search engine software to think that some of the text on your page is part of the HTML formatting information rather than your site’s content. As a result the search engine may ignore that text and your web page will not be shown in its results page.
Creating a search engine friendly website does not necessarily mean that you will get top listing for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. It is however a necessary first step if you want to rank anywhere near the first few pages of the search engine results. A site that is not search engine ready may not even appear in the results for any query. The tips in this article are the prerequisites for any website aspiring the top positions in Google Yahoo and the other search engines.
About the writer: Professional webmaster of Discount Web Design one of the leading web design company in the UK offering quality website design and SEO services.
