Make a great first impression

If you’re using email marketing to reach your buyers, your No. 1 goal should be to get people to read your message. We all get too many emails. The best way to rise above the clutter is by crafting an attention-grabbing subject line.

Legendary advertising executive David Ogilvy said, “When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

Here are a few tips for convincing readers to open that carefully-crafted email.

No. 1: Keep it short.

Email marketing software company Litmus suggests keeping your subject lines to no more than 50 characters. The quicker you’re able to get your point across, the better. The average human attention span has tumbled from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds, according to a 2015 study.

There’s also a technical reason to be concise. Longer subject lines may get “clipped,” depending on the type of device and email client the reader is using.

Litmus Software’s Subject Line Checker lets you preview your from name, subject line, and preview text in real time in over 15 popular email clients. MailChimp, another email marketing platform, also offers a subject line researcher. You can run A/B test subject lines of differing lengths and predict how a word or phrase will perform.

No. 2: Use capitalization sparingly.

It may be tempting to resort to all-caps, but it’s never a good idea. Using all capital letters makes your readers feel like you’re screaming at them, and it scares them away.

No. 3: Change it up.

Using the same subject line structure over and over again gets boring. Data management and marketing company Knowledge Marketing says subject lines like “Today’s news” are easy to ignore. Take the time to draft something creative that will entice the reader to open your message.

No. 4: Get personal.

MailChimp suggests using merge tags to personalize your subject lines with each recipient’s name or location. Personalization is shown to increase open rates for most users, and may work well when combined with targeted automations such as birthday deals and post-purchase follow-ups. A merge tag is a unique, text-based identifier that corresponds to the data in a list field. NM

For more: www.knowledgemarketing.com; https://litmus.com; www.mailchimp.com