Examples of good subject lines include:
- • Ace Corporation Announces User Webinar on January 16, 2010
- • Acme Services July 2010 Newsletter
- • Exclusive Holiday Offers From Retail Giant
- • How To Survive Tax Season With A&J Accounting
Clearly identifying your company, ideally in both the “from” address and the subject line (when possible), helps recipients recognize that your message is from a trusted source and someone they want to hear from. When your customers recognize the sender and expect the message, open rate is greatly enhanced.
When writing email message content, you’ll also want to engage customers with useful information they’ll enjoy receiving. For example, customers respond well to geographic targeting. So marketers can capture interest by simply mentioning the recipient’s local region or providing directions to a local branch, office or shop. To ensure relevance, a sports shop, for example, might want to promote snow boarding equipment to Vermont residents and golf equipment to their customer base in Florida. Marketers should also consider seasonal or current topics of interest. If New Years’ is right around the corner, a women’s clothier could showcase formal attire. Use humor to connect with readers, varying messages to ensure readers never feel inundated with repetitive content. List segmentation and email triggers also provide a cost-effective means for delivering highly relevant and timely information to subscribers.
Finally, send messages on a regular and predictable schedule. Ideally this means a customized schedule the customer selects, but at least monthly delivery is an acceptable rule-of-thumb for many industries. Email marketing campaigns sent too frequently can overwhelm busy customers and waste company time, money and resources. This can also increase spam complaints and opt-out requests. On the flipside, infrequent campaign delivery tends to confuse readers, as some forget who you are and assume that you don’t care enough to stay in contact with them more often. This sentiment, in turn, boosts spam reports, and companies tackle more and more hard bounces due to obsolete email accounts.
Launch, test and repeat to garner strong response and results. Companies that are able to pinpoint the ideal timing, content, send schedule and relevant message can maximize their open rates and build their corporate brand and ROI.
