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Filed under: Tip of the Day
 Here are 10 insider tips for crafting e-mails that will increase your open rate – and get customers and prospects really interested in you.
- Choose your subject wisely. Your e-mail recipient sees two key details before determining whether to open and read your e-mail: your name as the sender and the e-mail’s subject line.
- Grab your reader’s attention quickly with a clear and concise message. The first line of your e-mail should be consistent with your subject. Otherwise, your readers may think the subject was just a red herring or get impatient and move on from your e-mail almost immediately. You basically have 15 to 20 seconds of your readers’ attention.
- Know your readers. Include content that your readers want to read. If you repeatedly send them things they didn’t ask for, you risk having them unsubscribe from your list, and then you’ve lost them forever.
- Use strategic formatting: boldface, bullet points and subheads. Various studies have shown that most people scan words online, rather than read them. Use boldface to stress key ideas or subheads to draw the reader into a longer e-mail. Bullet points and numbered lists can delineate multiple ideas in a scan-friendly fashion. For more information on how people read things online, check out respected online consultant Jakob Nielsen’s work at www.useit.com.
- Include a call to action and response device. Why are you e-mailing the recipient? Is it to get them to buy something? Do you want them to learn more about a product?
- Choose the right day to send your e-mails. Mid-week is often the best time to ensure your e-mails get read. On Mondays, people are returning after the weekend to find their inboxes full of messages from the weekend. They’re also busy figuring out what their schedule for the week looks like, which further decreases the likelihood that an optional e-mail will get read.
- Write like you speak. People want to feel like they’re hearing from a real, live person. Considering you are in fact a real, live person, write the way you normally speak. Use your natural voice. Avoid corporate-sounding words. Don’t be a slave to grammar: If you’d normally start a sentence with “and” or “but,” do it. All that matters is that you communicate your message in such a way that your recipients absorb it and consider acting upon it.
- Consider e-mail marketing software. Companies such as Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com), iContact (www.icontact.com) and MailChimp (www.mailchimp.com) provide numerous features to support your e-mail marketing campaign, such as managing your e-mail lists, tracking who’s opening and reading your e-mails, and integrating them with social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook. Some services charge a monthly fee, but others offer a sliding scale based on the number of your e-mail recipients. MailChimp offers the software for free to anyone with 500 or fewer subscribers, with a sending limit of 3,000 total recipients per month.
- Track who’s reading your e-mails. Sites such as www.didtheyreadit.com or other e-mail marketing managers offer you the ability to track who is and isn’t opening your e-mails, as well as how long the e-mails sat in their in-boxes before getting opened. Some include the capability to measure whether people are clicking links within the e-mail or forwarding the messages to others. “If you’re going to send all these e-mails out, you don’t want to just send them,” Watson says. “You want to track them.”
- P.S. Don’t forget a postscript! For those people who skim e-mails rather than read them, the e-mail’s last line usually stands out because it marks the end of what they’re skimming. Use a postscript (P.S.) to reiterate the main offer in your e-mail. If recipients skimmed past it to begin with, this is your second chance to catch their attention. If the recipient actually read the whole e-mail, then it’s a short reinforcement of your core message.
Read the entire Stitches article here.
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