If you’re like a lot of the small business owners we talk with, email marketing is low on your to-do list. It feels old, congested, and well, not as exciting as the Facebook ads everyone is talking about.
We want to challenge you to think differently about email marketing. Here’s why:
- Email is still the preferred way consumers like to interact with brands. Yes, even the millennials. In fact, a study by Adobe revealed millennials are more frequent users of email than any other age group.
- Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. Yes, really! Read more.
- 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media. Learn more at Montage.
Are you convinced? Good! Now, let’s talk about how to get more people to open the emails you’re sending.
Tip #1: Write A Riveting Subject Line
—Spell out the benefit your audience will receive when they take the time to read your email. For example:
“Learn How To Make $5,000 in 30 Days” or “Get 50% Off Our Best Selling Handbag”
—Include positive, action-oriented verbs like:
- Get
- Learn
- Sell
- Master
- Join
- Discover
- Dominate
—Avoid using text and characters that flag spam filters like:
- Save
- Free
- Work From Home
- No Credit Check
- Congratulations
- Act Now
- Urgent
—Include a sense of urgency in the subject line text. For example:
“Today Only” or “Last Call”
—Name drop. For example, when you attend a conference and hear a big name speaker talk, take copious notes and create an email with the best of the best tips you learn. The same approach works if you read a how-to book by a leader in your industry. A subject line like this would be fabulous:
“5 Investor Secrets Mark Cuban Taught Me Today”
—Get Real. You are the expert in your field but we both know you too, have struggled from time to time. Your readers will find comfort when you humanize your Midas Touch. Try a subject line like:
“What I Would Do Differently If I Could Start Over” or “My #1 Most Embarrassing Moment”
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Tip #2: Mind The Clock
—Send emails promptly. If you’ve just gone to a conference and added 25 people to your email list (with permission of course), get those emails out with 24 hours. If you wait much longer, the people you met might forget all about you and press that dreaded “I never signed up for this list” button when they get your email. (If you get enough of those, you can get blacklisted by the email gods! Yikes!)
—Test your send time. You can spend all day researching the ideal send time, but truth be told, you’ll never know what the ideal send time is for your audience until you test it. Try sending one email at 6am, then another (on a different day of course) at 9:38am, and another around lunchtime. Then see what happens when you send something around the afternoon slump, at quittin’ time or once the kids are in bed for the night. Test, test and then test again.
—Be newsworthy. Pay attention to trending topics on social media and the top news stories that are circulating like wildfire and whenever possible, write emails that relate to them. For example, if the newscasters are predicting that a big hurricane is coming to town and you sell hurricane shutters, press that send button now.
Tip #3: Segment Your List
—Create email campaigns that target specific people with specific needs. For example, if you’re a life coach and you’re releasing a new high-end offer, you’ll probably want to send that only to your existing clients that are ready and willing to afford doing business with you at a higher level. It simply doesn’t make sense to send an offer like this to someone you met for the first time at a networking event yesterday and doing so will likely make them unsubscribe faster than you can say, “goodbye.”
Got more tips that will get more people to open your emails? Share ’em with us in the comments. We love learning with you!
P.S. Ready to get more people to open your emails? Remember to click here to get your 75 proven and powerful email subject lines that have generated millions of dollars in revenue!