As online advertising media keeps changing, the old-fashioned email campaign is beginning to look outdated. However, it's still a very effective marketing tool if you do it right.
Subject
The very first challenge for email campaigns is making the recipients open your messages. If they don't, there won't be any benefits from the campaigns. Let's review the research results conducted by Retention Science, specifically, the relation between the subject line length and the open rate (the rate of people who open the messages).
subject line length |
open rate |
0 - 5 words |
16% |
6 - 10 |
22% |
11 - 15 |
14% |
16 - 20 |
12% |
21 - 25 |
9% |
At a glance, the most effective line length seems to be from 6 to 10 words. Actually, the most important thing regarding subject line length is to describe the campaign clearly but with the lowest word count. If a subject is too short, it tends to be vague about the campaign. This is why the open rate of 0 to 5 word subjects isn't the highest. (What can you say about a campaign with 0 or 1 word?) As long as you can clearly describe your campaign within 4 words, you shouldn't try to lengthen it any further.
Campaigns
The easiest way to write short and clear subjects is to make campaigns easy to describe. To do so, include only similar products of the same category in a single campaign, rather than including many different kinds of products. On the one hand, if you include the whole nine yards in the campaign, you have to list them all (i.e., tablets, ink cartridges, monitors, etc.). On the other hand, if you narrow the product line for the campaign, you can simply state the name of the selected product in the subject (i.e., tablets blowout).
From
Last but not least, "from" is also important. If recipients of campaign emails want to open the email just because it is from "you," the conversion rates of email campaigns will really increase. Unfortunately, there is no magic potion to make people think "because of you." You've got to do daily tasks properly, such as complying with customers' requests. Customers judge your business based on your daily behaviours, so don't ignore these actions.
© December, 2014