Get your email opened!

Do you send out marketing emails? Do you want to increase your open and conversion rates? Here are some tips I sent to a client a couple of weeks back. He’s in the public relations business, so the whole thing has a bit of a PR angle to it. Still, it’s useful advice whatever industry you’re in:

1. A good basic approach is to think like you’re headlining a story or a release - try to summarise the benefit/angle in the subject line.

2. Taking the story idea further, one of the advantages of email is that people at first only see the ‘headline’ (i.e., the subject line). They can’t scan the top of the ’story’ (i.e., the body of the email) to see if it measures up to the expectations the subject line has set up. That means that you can use your reader’s curiosity to your advantage. A good way to do this is to make the subject line a question or a startling fact that readers want to know the answer to/more about.

3. Remember that getting them to open the email isn’t the same as getting them to read it. So the bodycopy really has to deliver on the promise of the headline.

4. Building from that, make your recipients a promise and deliver it. I always think the best email marketing (and this is particularly the case with email newsletter marketing) offers its readers a benefit in and of itself. In other words, the marketing shot takes the form of a newsletter with some interesting or useful information that the readers can benefit from even if they don’t take up the offer. In this scenario you might not make a sale from an individual customer but you have had a chance to build trust for next time.

5. Split test.  Write two or three different subject lines and send emails headed with each one to a small percentage of your list. Study the return rates and choose the one that gets the best response. As well as increasing your response rate, over time this helps you build up a picture of what your audience responds to, giving you useful information for when you’re writing releases/ website copy/ brochures and the rest.

6. Even if you do it very well, your open rate will be small and your response rate smaller. Based on my limited experience, and from what I’ve heard, a 1-10% open rate and a conversion rate that’s about 1-5% of that is about average. If you send out 10,000 emails and get 50 leads, you’re doing very well. So the size of your list is important. Obviously the rates vary by market, offer and quality of the email.