E-mail marketing campaigns can be a great way to increase your online profile. I always include E-mail campaigns in my annual marketing budget as they really do work hard to boost site traffic and ROI.
However, creating successful email marketing campaigns is not always easy. You need to know your market well and understand just how to target your E-mails to get the best effect from them.
- Ideally the E-mails you send out will instigate an appropriate response from the recipient.
- Typically, I will include one or two key links back to my website. The whole E-mail will then be tailored towards encouraging recipients to click on the links and visit my website.
Subject Line Clinchers
One of the most important aspects of any marketing E-mail is the subject line. This will be the first contact with the recipient and has to be engaging. People do treat E-mails very lightly and will delete anything they don’t find interesting before reading the content. This means the subject line must convey a powerful message to trigger the recipient to answer the email.
You need to create a real sense of need and curiosity so that they open the E-mail even if they are not sure who it is from or whether it is relevant to them. Creating great subject lines can be tricky so here are a few top tips I have picked up recently from expert copywriters to help you with this task.
1. Simple and Concise
I always try and keep the subject lines short and sweet. If you make them too complicated or long-winded, people will lose interest and delete them before any messages can be delivered. To help me achieve this I write out a sentence summarizing the main points of my E-mail. I then edit this until I get it down to around three to six words.
2. Key Words to Avoid
A friend in the SEO copywriting business gave me some invaluable pointers about what not to do for E-mail marketing campaigns. People are fed up of spam in their inbox and certain words will trigger an instant ‘spam alert’ response.
You need to avoid over-used words in the E-mail marketing world for your subject line including ‘Free’, ‘Help’, ‘Money Off/Percent Off’ and ‘Reminder’. Not only will these over-used words trigger standard inbox spam filters in most cases, but they will also put people off opening the E-mails.
3. Personalization
You should never be sending out E-mails in your marketing campaigns to unsolicited contacts (this is considered spam). You should have a list of subscribers that you are using for your campaigns and this means you should have their details.
To increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign, you should try and include some personal details in the subject line. If you know the region in which they live then including local city and place names can also be an effective trigger to encourage recipients to open E-mails.
4. From Information
Studies have shown that people also scan the ‘From’ line when deciding whether or not to open E-mails. It is important that the ‘From’ and ‘Subject’ lines work together. The ‘From’ line can authentic the ‘Subject’ line.
- For example, you may run an online pet supply business. You want to send out an E-mail campaign advertising your latest seasonal sale.
- You could send an E-mail titled something like ‘Summer Savings on London Pet Supplies’ in the ‘Subject’ line.
- Your ‘From’ line should show that you are in the pet supply business and authenticate the e-mail subject message.
- So you could ensure the ‘From’ line reads something ‘Londonpetsupplies.com’ or ‘Cheappetssupplies.com’
About the author: If you don’t know how to get started with E-mail marketing then contact professional copywriters for more expert advice. Apple Copywriting developed successful email marketing campaigns for my business and they could help you to.