According to a recent MarketingSherpa.com survey, 40% of email marketers said testing changes to just their subject line had a high impact on their return on investment (ROI). 45% said subject line changes accounted for a medium ROI and only 15% said that testing changes to their subject line results in a low ROI.

For every email you send you’ve got room for about 50 characters in your subject line so use them wisely to improve your open rates. Below are some tips to help improve your subject lines:

1. Test the subject line – Take a look at email campaigns you’ve sent in the past. Which subject lines worked the best and gave you the highest open and conversion rates? You might find that for a particular topic there’s a general trend or subject style that resulted in higher open rates.
2. The subject of importance – Try and put as much important and relevant information into your subject lines as possible. For example, if you’re sending out an email about a special offer make sure the product name and details on the offer appear in the subject line in a clear and concise format such as “$40 off ACME Widget Until – Today Only”.
3. Personalize the subject line – If you have details about your contacts then you can use them in your subject line to get their attention. A subject line containing the contacts first name can sometimes out-pull one that doesn’t.
4. Avoid spam keywords – Most email servers automatically filter out any emails that contain spam keywords in their subject line – Words such as free, stock, ebay, password, mortgage, etc all trigger spam detection software so keep them out of your subject lines at all times.
5. Trigger curiosity – The best way to improve your open rates is to pique the interest of your contacts. A compelling headline that entices them to open and read the contents of your email can do wonders for your conversion rate. Headlines that trigger curiosity can sometimes work well for example: “Hi [First Name] – I have a question for you.”.
6. Make the offer clear – If you’re making a special offer to your contact then be upfront and include it as part of your subject line. People love bargains and special offers so let them know about it before anything else.
7. Emphasize the benefits – We use this technique for our newsletters. We always use the format of “Newsletter – [Benefit]“. In our case, benefit is always the title of an article contained in the newsletter, such as “Company Newsletter – 10 Tips for Better Subject Lines”. It works every time
8. Easy identification – Make sure your contacts know the email is coming from you. Deceptive subject lines can confuse people so always try and including your company name in the subject line. Also, make sure you set the “From” attribute of your email to include your name and your companies name, such as “From: John Smith “.
9. Exclaim nothing – Avoid using excessive punctuation at the end of your subject lines. Google bans punctuation from AdWords ad’s for a reason – too much hype can annoy and confuse people.

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W3Contact.com
Automated Email Marketing System
www.w3contact.com

$1 spent on email advertising has shown to return between $45 and $51 (According to the Direct Marketing Association). And contrary to what you may think, email gets opened and read. Typical direct mail piece is opened by 4% of its audience.  Email open rates often approach 40%.

Email marketing is affordable

Online campaigns are 20 times more cost-effective than direct mail, with individual email messages often costing just fractions of a penny. As a result, email makes it practical to communicate more often with customers.

Email marketing is easy

Sending out professional-quality campaigns is now a do-it-yourself project for anyone with basic computer skills.

Email marketing is fast and flexible

Need to boost revenue right away? Email marketing allows you to broadcast to everyone at Internet speed. Initial campaign response generally occurs within 48 hours of launch.

Email marketing grows relationships

Emailing personalized offers or your industry insite is an efficient way to make customers feel important. If you make customers feel appreciated and they find value, you can gain their loyalty while offering the perfect avenue for referrals.

Email marketing is measurable

A great advantage of email is that everything can be tracked. Unlike direct mail, from the moment you send an email, you can see how many people opened it, clicked on certain links, forwarded it to others, and much more!

Give us a try and see how easy we can make your email marketing efforts.

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W3Contact.com
Automated Email Marketing System
www.w3contact.com

1. Don’t send test messages to your entire email list.
2. Don’t send out giant un-targeted “spam” mailings.
3. Don’t send out HTML emails with broken links.
4. Don’t send out un-optimized rich media emails with large attachments. These take a long time to download on a slow modem connection.
5. Don’t send out HTML mailings accidentally as TEXT.
6. Don’t send mailings to people who have asked to be removed.

Violate one or more of these rules and your marketing can instead become “anti-marketing”, causing a negative brand image and losing potential customers. Email is an incredibly effective tool, but only when used correctly. Show respect to the individuals on your email lists, and pay careful attention to the details of the mailing itself, and you can reap the benefits of email marketing.

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W3Contact.com
Automated Email Marketing System
www.w3contact.com

Rule #1

The first and most important rule is to only send relevant content to persons who have requested it. What does this mean? Well, let’s say you are a travel and adventure planning company. If someone has subscribed to your Kayaking Monthly Newsletter, don’t move them over to your European Vacations list and send them an article on Dining in Tuscany. In most cases, you will very quickly lose any prospect or reduce the lifetime value of your relationship with an existing client. If the person also subscribed to it, it would be okay to send him or her a monthly company newsletter that from time to time had information on other topics, but don’t mix newsletter bases just to increase mailing volumes.

Rule #2

The second rule is to be consistent with your sending frequency. Depending on your type of business and your subscriber interest level, the right volume for you could be weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Once you find the frequency that is right for your organization (and this could vary newsletter to newsletter), stick with it. We see a lot of companies whose email strategy can only be defined as “ad hoc.” Rather than blasting out a promotion whenever sales are lagging, we recommend having an emailing schedule for each newsletter and sticking to it, whether it be every Saturday, every other Wednesday, or on the 15 th of each month.

Stick With It

If you stick with sending relevant, high quality content-rich emails on a consistent basis to persons who have requested to receive your emails, you will increase your prospect to customer conversion rates and customer lifetime value at a fraction of the of the cost of traditional methods and take advantage of the best type of marketing possible—free marketing through authentic customer word-of-month.

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W3Contact.com
Automated Email Marketing System
www.w3contact.com

1. First and most important. Make sure all your email recipients are opt in or double opt in. This means that they have subscribed to your ezine, newsletter, report or e-course.

2. Always provide an unsubscribe link.

3. Always sign each email with your name, address, company, telephone number and email address. This will help ensure you are never accused of spam or at least you will be found innocent.

4. Keep the email short, with each paragraph 5-10 lines at most. People are in a hurry and scan most emails, so make sure your email has the most important point in the first sentence of each paragraph.

5. Create a compelling or interesting subject line. You at least want your email to get opened. Good headlines aren’t hype or over stated, simply tell what benefit the reader will get for opening and reading your email.

6. Format TEXT emails to 60-65 lines. This ensures your email won’t look like:

when you send an email
make sure its properly formatted with 60-65 characters
per line
with a ‘hard return’ so it
looks even and professional.

A great program to use to help format TEXT emails is called “Text Formater Plus“.

7. Try using a P.S. in your emails. People tend to scan and read the P.S. if nothing else.

8. Try to add your own “personality” to the email content. People want to associate with those who seem real and sincere. Don’t come across as just another salesman trying o sell something.

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W3Contact.com
Automated Email Marketing Systemwww.w3contact.com