When it comes to email marketing, we’ll excuse you if you feel like you’ve heard it all before. With email’s massive revenue potential, however, it pays to listen. The average email campaign brings in around $40 per $1 spent on marketing. There’s a reason people tend to read everything they can get their hands on about the subject. I’ll try to keep it interesting, but here are three tips that may help your mass email campaign.
THE TIPS
Stop worrying so much about your subject lines
The amount of research that’s been done on subject lines is staggering, and reading through it all yield a pretty simple conclusion: no one knows what the hell they’re doing. I suggest you do your own research. Your autoresponder software should already be pumping out plenty of emails, so start testing different subject lines lengths on some of your subgroups. Leave one as your control group, then send identical emails to another with only the subject line, say, shortened. See if it helps, then try it again and again. Try longer subject lines. Try subject lines with specific offers in them, then try some without offers…you get the picture.
Send more emails but do less work
Hopefully you’ve caught on by now to autoresponders – unlimited ways to send unlimited emails to your email lists without needing someone to physically send those emails. Use them to send a few emails per initiative. One email isn’t enough, but there’s certainly a line where too many emails will get thrown away or marked as spam. Again, test this one and try to find the sweet spot on email regularity.
Switch up the email contents as well. Your first message should probably be attention-grabbing and fancy, while each subsequent auto responder message should be more and more simple. “Personalized” emails from members of your team (in parentheses because they shouldn’t actually be personal messages unless you’re selling diamond watches or yachts) with simple contents will do the trick as you send more emails.
“The Fold” may very well be a myth
This article sums it up very nicely. We’ve been told for year to never, ever put your call to action “below the fold,” or below your website’s copy. The Kissmetrics post does a good job showing just how seriously most startups take this advice. But the key for your email marketing campaign is the same – consumers are likely to sign up if they are motivated to sign up and if they know exactly what they’ll get for clicking. Writing good copy in your emails, then, becomes that much more important