Last month in Vortex’s Marketing Blog, we covered how to create effective funnels to attract new clients to your email list. Once they’re in your funnel, what’s next?
In Part 3 of the Vortex Marketing Blog’s series: How to Grow and Maintain a Healthy Email List, we’ll cover the most important aspect of sending emails out to your growing email list: subject lines.
Subject Lines
Subject lines are by far the most important part of any email. Whether or not someone opens your email is going to hinge on how much the subject line grabs them, regardless of the content inside. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when writing your subject lines.
Always Have An Offer
When writing your subject lines, always make sure to have some kind of offer in them. Before they even open the email, users need to know that they’re going to benefit somehow from it. Don’t hide the offer in the body of the email, let them know that if they open this email now they’re getting some kind of deal. At the same time, don’t go overboard with a sales pitch-heavy subject line. Mailchimp, one of the leaders in email marketing, put it this way: “Don’t sell what’s in your email, tell what’s in your email.”
Personalization
Another way to catch a users attention in their mailbox is to personalize your subject lines with their name. Simply including their first name in the subject line conveys a more personal relationship with the user, and strikes a more conversational tone. Users are more likely to open an email that identifies them by name instead of generic marketing lingo. Most popular email marketing platforms contain merge tag functionality, which can automatically pull a user’s name from your database and paste it into each email, but make sure this is set up correctly before you send it!
Experiment and Add Variety
Always be willing to try something new with your subject lines. If your emails all have the same generic feel, users may get bored, lose interest, and ultimately stop reading your emails. One way to do this is through A/B testing your subject lines.
When A/B testing, you’ll write two different but similar subject lines; they both convey the same idea, but may use slightly different words or tone. Once your subject lines are written, your email marketing platform will automatically divide your list into two even groups, and send each a different subject line.
Once the email has been sent out, you can compare the opening rate of each subject line to see which performed better, and use this knowledge when creating your next email.
Come back next time where we will go over best practices for the content of your emails!
Need help creating an effective email marketing campaign?
Call Vortex Business Solutions today at 319.354.0019 for a free consultation, or visit VortexBusinessSolutions.com.
