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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.
Filed under: General, Uncategorized
THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED. WE WILL POST WINNER SHORTLY!
Advantages’ magazine did a great story this month about how to energize your business emails and make them more efficient while pointing out the do’s and don’ts of workplace correspondence. Of course, being someone who has been using email for business for well over 10 years I have seen my share of poorly written and cringeworthy emails (perhaps, even guilty of a few!). In the article was a great example of an email that, though seemingly innocuous and good-intentioned, contained a ton of problems. Below is the example without the corrections …
Think you can point out all the problems with this email? Prove it! Send us an email to feedback@asicentral.com with all the errors and, if you get the most right, we’ll post your name in an upcoming Counselor PromoGram and Advantages Hot Deals newsletter!
Good luck!
– sexybeast@asicentral.com
Filed under: Marketing
Everyone gets too much e-mail. The key is to make people open your e-mail marketing efforts. Here are three tips to make sure that your subject line stops them from just hitting delete:
1. Write the subject line last. “It makes more sense to come back to the subject line after you finish writing the content,” says John Arnold, author of E-mail Marketing for Dummies and Web Marketing for Dummies. “Look for the most compelling topic to highlight in your subject line.”
2. Give a hint. “A vague subject line is a waste of space,” Arnold says. For example, consider a monthly newsletter with the subject line of “Bob’s Bistro Newsletter: July, 2009.” According to Arnold, “This fails to tell the recipients anything about what they will find when they open the e-mail and offers very little reason to do so. A better approach for a newsletter is, ‘Bob’s Bistro: Our favorite recipes shared.’”
3. Keep it short and simple. In just three seconds or less, recipients will either open or delete your e-mail, says Arnold. And “with only 30-50 characters, including spaces, to create a winning subject line, you must convey your most powerful statement into those few words.” – Kenneth Hein
– From Counselor’s 2009 State of the Industry
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