As a small business owner email marketing is a gift, because it enables you to speak directly to your audience and you have control of the data. Done well, it is cited to generate a 40:1 ROI and it can help you not only to acquire new customers but also nurture existing ones. It is an essential part of the marketing toolkit for any organisation regardless of size. With an anticipated 4.3 billion email addresses by 2023 the number of email usage is increasing. Successful email subject lines can make the difference between someone opening the email, engaging and not.
But where do you start? You first need to start the conversation and that is where a good email subject line comes in. In fact 47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone and 69% of recipients report an email as spam on the subject line. There is some debate between leading deployment tools such as Mailchimp, who suggest that the most obvious of subject lines works more effectively eg: “The Company’s Annual Report”. However, I am not convinced that as a consumer it is the most engaging.
In our blog this month we share 6 things for you to consider when writing a successful subject line, to help you to cut through the noise in your inbox. As with all writing, when deciding on your subject line we need to keep it succinct. To ensure it is visible on a mobile device aim to keep it to 4-7 words (30-50 characters) in length.
- Personalise the content. You can personalise the email by putting the person’s name, location or specific interest in the subject line, making it relevant. Eg: “Sophie, you get double points in August to celebrate your birthday!” (Boots emails).
- Create a sense of mystery or curiosity eg: “Did you mean to leave this behind?” (Argos abandon cart email subject line).
- Create a sense of urgency or scarcity with deadlines eg: “SALE is here – up to 50% off!” (Mint Velvet Sale email).
- Clearly state the value the reader will gain eg: “You £15 reward is waiting” (Majestic Wines).
- Segment your list. As you start to go beyond sending a monthly newsletter this becomes really important. It is definitely worth thinking about from the beginning, consider how you may wish to talk to your audience in the future and the different groups you may wish to target.
- Good content. As with all marketing, giving people a reason to share their email address is key and always ensuring you are sharing useful, relevant content that answers thei questions will be important in retaining your audience.
Don’t forget to test and refine your approach. Be clear on what success looks like by defining your goals and ambitions up front, they should link back to you overarching marketing strategy.
We generally see the response to an email with about 4 hours of sending it, so ensuring you plan the day and time you send your emails is important thing to consider. The optimum time to send an email will vary by business and sector. If you are a professional services business for example, Tuesday, Thursday or Friday morning might be a good time to deploy your email. If you are a hotel or leisure business however, Wednesday evening or Thursday morning might be a good time.
There are a couple of tools out there that can help you to stress test your subject line some useful ones include: Subjectline.com, CoSchedule and Zurb.com; Is Not Spam also have a great tool to check that your email subject lines won’t drop into the spam filters.
If you are keen to make more of your email marketing channel, or need some help getting started please get in touch to arrange a no-obligation discovery call.
Sources:
