Getting people to open an email is a difficult thing. Sometimes I even have trouble getting my friends and family to open and respond to emails, and I already know them! It’s exponentially harder to create strong open and click through rates when it comes to email marketing. We’ve covered the discussion about when to send emails, but successful email marketing campaigns have a lot more than great timing. If you really want your email campaigns to succeed you also have to consider your content and your subject line.
Content:
1. Your content should be applicable to your audience. This may seem obvious but all too often we see brands sending emails on what’s important to the company, not to the audience.
2. Make it timely. Chances are you have a much better shot at getting someone to open and actually read your email if it’s on a subject that is already on their mind. This means you have to be ready to quickly develop content that relates to everything from current news to recent weather events to the latest pop culture headlines.
3. Don’t write a book. The quickest way to lose your audience is to have an email with too much content. Keep it short and sweet and give them links to more information. The less copy the audience sees when they open the email, often times the more likely they are to read it.
Subject lines:
4. Set expectations. People need to know what’s in the email if they’re going to open it. And be honest, if you try to bait and switch them that’s the last time they’ll open an email from you. The subject line should clearly convey what they can expect to read in the email.
5. Make it timely and relevant to your audience. It’s the same principle as the content strategies listed above. If you can leverage a current topic that’s already top of mind you’re in a great position to get them engaged with your content.
6. Keep it Short. This can be the hardest part of crafting subject lines but it pays to be succinct. 50 characters or less is what you should aim for, but if you can get it to 30-40 characters you’re in really good shape.
