Archive for October, 2011
The Importance of Your E-Mail Subject Line
Written by: Nick Hantge
One of the first things I do when I pull up my email is try and delete as many of the "junk" emails I can. I usually find myself looking at who my unread emails are from and what the subject line is to help me do this. If you get anywhere near the amount of emails I get each day, chances are you do the same. If there is anything that looks like it is from a company I don't know or some type of advertisement or spam, it gets deleted before I even open it up.
What is the deciding factor?? Usually people will look at who the email is from first as it is always listed first and then our eyes make their way to the subject line if we don't recognize the sender. "The subject line is usally the deciding factor. It is essential that your email subject line not look like ad copy" says Susan Sweeney, the author of 101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site.
It is important to never leave a subject line of an email blank as it will look non important or empty. It is also important to keep your subject line short with the most important keywords written first. You do not want your subject line long as people now days view their emails on their phone which allows fewer characters in the preview on the phone email display.
Just as a newspaper headline is extremely important to reach out to its readers, so is the subject line of a mass email. You skim a newspaper to look for articles that are important or of interest to you just like your full email box. The content with poor headlines, simply do not get read. It doesn’t matter how much value is offered in the email or how good the content or images are if the email doesn’t get opened. The first goal of every email blast campaign is to have the largest open rate possible. This is achieved nearly 100% on the subject line of your email.
Important Factors of A Subject Line:
- Do not look like ad copy
- Attract attention with action words
- Brief, important, keyworded statements
- Build business credibility
- Do not use vague statements
- Positive messages
- AVOID ALL CAPS
The most effective subject lines will grab the reader’s attention, isolate and qualify the reader so they feel like the email is written for them. Keywords are important to have in your subject line as many people will search through their emails later as they didn’t have time to read them when they first received the email. If you include keywords in your subject line, chances are they will be able to be searched for later!
Email marketing is a great strategy to attract new visitors to your website. Our Denver seo company uses this strategy to test out our different landing pages. We will use Google analytics to track the visitors response to different pages on our site so we know if we need to make adjustments to existing pages to lower the bounce rate, decrease the exit rate or improve our call to action. If run a mass email marketing campaign that produces 500 visits to a specific page but they leave after 10 seconds, do not visit other pages and we receive no calls or emails… chances are visitors from the search engines won’t either!
