In this new year, there are a couple of things that have not changed. And since marketing directly affects your bottom line, here’s a really quick refresher.
- Email is an incredible marketing investment.
- For emails to be effective, they have to be opened.
Let’s address the first one quickly. Once you buy email copy from a copywriter, it’s yours. If it’s a great email, you can use it multiple times.
If you paid me $500 for an email (I don’t usually charge that much, but you can definitely pay me that much if you’d like) and sent it to 1,000 people, you’d have invested fifty cents an email. That’s less than postage alone for a regular letter.
Obviously the larger your list, the smaller your investment becomes. Depending on your email service, you’ll know how many emails were opened. You may even know how long people spent viewing the email.
We’ve already touched on the second point. Opened emails. Unless customers open the email, it’s not going to be very effective.
To learn and become a better copywriter, I’ve subscribed to several email lists. I love china, beautiful tables, and food. From one company who sells tableware, I get an almost daily email. The subject line is regularly “30% Off Sale.” When they get creative, it says, “(enter appropriate season) Sale 30% Off.” I don’t open their emails anymore.
If every day is 30% off, isn’t that just the regular price? As a shopper, if the subject line never changes, why open the email?
When people check their email, they note two things immediately. (less than 8 seconds)
The sender
The subject line
If your partner, your mom, your children, or your boss sent you an email, you'd probably check it out right away.
If it’s from someone else, you may wait until later.
Other emails, like my tableware company, may be immediately deleted unless they catch your attention with a great subject line.
If my tableware company had a subject line like, “See the Pattern Harry and Meghan Picked for their California Home,” I might check to see if Harry and Meghan have good taste. 😊
What if you read, “See the Plate so Shiny that it Reflected the Killer’s Face…” You may or may not buy those plates, but I bet you’d open the email.
The subject line matters. I wrote about creating emails for a 14-day summit a while back. I learned that participants who signed up for the summit stopped opening the daily emails.
Even though they had signed up for the summit, interest waned.
The participants knew the sender. They knew the email had valuable contents. And still, they required a fresh, new subject line each day to maintain open rates.
Emails need a lot more than just a desired sender and a great subject line, but you have to start somewhere. Without those, great contents won’t matter to most of your customers.
With the sender and subject line in mind, check out a couple things before your next email campaign. See who is listed as the sender. Some service companies show, “Sent by So and So Service” not your business name.
Also check out how much of the subject line shows up. Each email provider is different. Maybe the reader will get 30 characters and that’s it. Another company will show 50 characters and the first part of the first sentence of the email. With this in mind, put the good stuff first especially if your subject line is long.
Finally, as a copywriter, I love writing emails. However, maybe you already have a strong email you want to run again. I can help there too. I can freshen up the email with a few changes. Or, I can write you some great new subject lines to breathe new life into your email.
If you’re not using email in your marketing efforts, you should be. It has one of the best ROIs out there.