Whether you’re sending a single email or crafting one that will be distributed to thousands, there are a number of things you can’t overlook if you want to get the most opens and clicks possible. Sure, you could get lucky and achieve the metrics you’re looking for, but why leave it up to chance? Counting on luck is a bad digital marketing decision.

Subject Line

The email subject line is so important that, if it isn’t carefully crafted, the following suggestions may prove moot. Without it, there’s a pretty good chance they won’t open the email and get to the body copy and the holy grail of digital marketing–the CTA (Call to Action).

The key to creating a great Subject Line is to not give away too much information, but just enough to make the viewer want to open it. Great examples are “What they never tell you about when you file for bankruptcy” or “Don’t do this when applying for a job” or “Are you positive you’re safe from ransomware?”. You don’t want to mislead recipients, but give them just enough info to make them want to peer inside.

Personalizing the Subject Line with the recipient’s first name can vastly improve your open rate. Several studies indicate that doing so enhances opens by anywhere from 35-50%. Also, use your, or another person’s, actual email address so that it shows up as being Sent From. If they receive an email from Sales@ or Marketing@, your open rates will suffer. 

Clear, concise; yes, less is more

Sure, you want to display your writing prowess, but don’t get sucked in to writing for yourself. It’s a common mistake, but, remember, you’re writing to get recipients to act on your CTA. Be concise and remember that less is more. Try and keep the email copy to under 200 words and break up the text into a few paragraphs. You don’t want a single, solid one; that will make your 200 words look like a lot more. If you open an email and are hit with several hundred words, your mind immediately calculates the time you’ll have to invest to get through those words. Get to the point, and fast. Your goal is to get them to take action as soon as possible.

Don’t forget the white space. Without it, even the most concisely written copy can appear too long. White space combats clutter, the enemy of good content.

Using images? Include alt-text

Breaking up copy with an image is fine, just make sure it isn’t overpowering. Also, make sure it includes alt-text so it can be displayed on whichever browser the recipient may be using. No alt-text, no image, no good.

It’s all about the CTA

Don’t make CTAs hard to find. They should be prominently displayed, whether it’s clicking on a button, hitting a link, or filling out a form. Remember, that’s the ultimate goal—getting recipients to act on the CTA. You can include additional touchpoints, like social media icons linking to your page, but make sure they don’t interfere with your CTA.

Know your personas

Think about who will be receiving the emails and create personas for them. What will they act on, what will turn them off? If your campaign is targeting C-level professionals, your copy needs to address the types of responsibilities maintained by that level of employee. For them, you may not include as much granular information about a product or service, but more about how it can enhance ROI and affect things like CAPEX or OPEX. In other words, know your audience and write to them.

Words to avoid, lists to exclude

Steer clear of words that can trigger spam filters, like guarantee, winner, order now, free, risk-free, congratulations, etc. They can send your carefully crafted email straight into recipients’ spam folders. And while we’re on the subject, sending out to purchased email lists is another good way to get your emails flagged. If you’re using an Email Service Provider (ESP) and you send to a purchased list, you’re playing with fire. They often contain spam traps, which are emails included in the lists that signal the ESP that it’s a purchased list (they don’t like purchased lists).  In other words, the ESP will know that this isn’t a list of recipients who have opted-in to receive the email. And if recipients flag your email as spam, the ESP will soon reach out to you wanting more information on the list, how you got it, etc. Also, purchased lists will often have a lot of hard bounces (bad email addresses), which is another red flag for the ESP.

Don’t forget to Test

Take the time to conduct A/B testing, which tests 2 versions of the email. For instance, you may want to test 2 Subject Lines, so a small percentage of the list receives email A, the other email B. The winning email (the one with the most opens) is then sent to the rest of the list. You can test subject lines, email copy, images, promotions, CTAs, etc. It’s a great way to hone your messaging and efficiently get the most effective version in front of the most amount of people.

Also, test your email in different browsers and on mobile devices. There’s a good chance that at least 50% of your emails will be viewed on a smartphone, and if it doesn’t look right, you’ve essentially scrapped half of the messages sent, maybe more.

Contact the experts

If you need the help of an online marketing agency with more than a decade of experience, Globe Runner is your partner. We are here to help inject your digital marketing initiatives with rocket fuel and launching it to success. If you’re ready to blast off, call us at (972) 472-8528 for a free digital marketing consultation.

by Alicia Kan

No matter how successful your marketing automation work flow is, each element can always benefit from occasional testing and refinement. We’ve compiled some of the best recommendations in our Testing To-Do list that seem worthy of the experimentation given the stellar results reported. They may inspire similar improvements on your end:

A/B test a fully designed email with a plain text one

For some time now, it’s been marketers’ common struggle for their emails to even make it to recipients’ inboxes — Gmail famously shunts Mailchimp, Constant Contact and other promotional emails to the Promotions tab where they languish unless a recipient marks an email as something they’d like to see in the main folder. (Or, senders go through the labor-intensive process of DKIM to get Google’s rubber stamp of approval.)

Perhaps dialing down the design elements and making an email seem ‘official’, i.e. just plain text, circumvents the rerouting. Sharpspring reports that click-through rates for plain text emails are double those of emails using a decorative template.

The Customer Acquisition Consultant reports similar results when he did an A/B test. His take: Plain text emails are less likely to be caught in spam filters, don’t look like ads, and feel more personal. “Ugly could be effective,” was his verdict.

Send a welcome email that’s a keeper

How many of us have received the canned ‘thank you for subscribing’ email and immediately deleted it? Whether you’re an online retailer or a professional services firm, the humble thank you email can be elevated into a missive that brings your prospect closer to being a customer. Some food for thought:

Customize the email with the recipient’s first name. That prospect has just signed up; get to a first-name basis with your welcome email. This Harvey Nichols example via Ometria is simple, spare and makes the recipient feel like the center of their universe:

Give away something of value. Via Teachable: Noah Kagan, co-founder of the very successful AppSumo, has a short welcome email that gives away a presentation on his best rogue marketing strategies as well as a book on his days at Facebook (he was employee #30). Obviously an email not meant for the junk folder.

If you’re a retailer, get them to start shopping while they’re in the mood. Your recipient is feeling expansive after sharing his or her email address. Capitalize on the endorphin rush by dangling instant gratification images and calls-to-action.

This Crate and Barrel welcome email has an irresistible picture — imagine yourself entertaining al fresco! — and a solitary call-to-action button. It’s just one of many excellent retail examples shared by Smiley Cat.

Make people think twice about unsubscribing

Unsubscribe numbers are among the hardest to view among marketing automation metrics, but some creative marketers have managed to make the breakup process harder with their emails. Some techniques you may consider for your own sequence:

Give people the choice of taking a break. From Contently comes this clever Yankee Candle email that offers a ‘snooze’ option for 30 days, a fantastic option for the holidays when email marketing goes into overdrive.

Get ’em to smile. It is possible with an unsubscribe email, as True Citrus shows below. This example via Jellyvision ticks all the boxes: It gets to the heart of the matter; it’s witty; it makes a (classy) last-ditch attempt to keep the subscriber. Honestly, would you unsubscribe with this level of effort?

And if they really, really want to go? Set them free and four weeks later:

Schedule a re-engagement email. The caveat is you must have a great message and an irresistible offer, like this Missguided example provided by the good folks at Emma.

Got any more fantastic examples to add to the above? Post a link in the comments section.

Image: Good marketing automation is like this Wasabi sushi conveyor belt — every part works as hard as it can to create an effective work flow.

Delivery is the foundation of good story-telling. Any comedian will tell you that if you deliver a bad joke the right way, you can make it funny. The same goes for email marketing. How you currently break up and deliver your email communications and segment your audience based on what they do (in addition to what they say) is what determines its efficacy.

Segmentation Based on Action

You may already be segmenting your emails based on groups i.e. business groups, demographic types and membership (paid, free, lapsed). Even if this has proven to be effective, it can be even more helpful to segment according to action; segment based on the behavior or action that your audience takes relative to the service you’re offering.

Why is action louder than words? Instead of connecting with people based just on their membership type or whether they’re male or female, connect with them based on what they do—helping to foster a more personal connection. For example, say someone downloaded a whitepaper or opened an article on your website. Instead of getting caught up on getting their personal information, focus on communicating with them based on what they did by offering them a next step or a subtle call-to-action.

Segment Your Segments

If the customer who downloaded a whitepaper or article identifies themselves as someone familiar in your trade of business, you can create narrowly focused segmentations based on this information. Use this information to develop engaging and relative content.

Although it may seem cumbersome, and far from the foundation of automated email marketing, you’re more likely to get results with email segmentation.

MailChimp scanned their users who use segmentation tools and compared the list of segmented campaigns to the results of the same customers’ non-segmented campaigns. “When we measured stats ‘across all segmented campaigns,’ segmented campaigns performed markedly better than their non-segmented counterparts.”

What your customers do may be more telling than what they say which can help your email communications be more relevant and successful.

Do you use email segmentation? How much do you depend on user information over their actions?

Let us know via Twitter.

We recently had an issue where one of our inboxes was nearly full. So we reached out and did some research to find the best method of reliably backing up a Gmail inbox and clearing it. We found that the best method is with getmail, a Linux utility that fetches mail through IMAP. It is very powerful and flexible, providing a lot of options. There are several different methods as well (outlined below).

Overall, we recommend using getmail. By trying several different approaches, getmail is by far the best. It is a little confusing at first, but not a hard pill to swallow:

How do you install getmail?

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install dovecot-imapd getmail4

Arch Linux:

pacman -S getmail

Centos:

yum install getmail*

Here are some resources for backing up gmail with Linux:
getmail:

• Matt Cutts explains how to backup gmail with getmail 
• Linode documentation goes over getmail setup
• Getmail documentation
• Configuring getmail

If you don’t like getmail there are several different options out there:
BagoMa:

• Ebixio blog explains how to back up gmail with bagoma
• Bagoma documentation

Fetchmail:

• Life hacker explains how to backup gmail with fetchmail
• Periodically backing up your email with fetchmail

W4RJ8XDCJ8DS

We caught up with Email marketing expert and Conversion Scientist Brian Massey at last night’s DFW SEM meeting- always a treat, we love Brian. Check it out!

Transcript

Eric: Hi, it’s Eric from Globe Runner SEO, and tonight we’re at DFW SEM. We love coming to these events because of the great speakers that they bring, and to tonight I’m talking with Brian Massey, the conversion scientist, one of the smartest guys I know. Brian and I have actually known each other for about a year now. I originally saw you at PubCon. We scheduled a phone call. You helped me out with one of my websites, and you gave me a lot of great insight. I thought I’ve got to pull Brian aside, take a few minutes to talk to you.

One of the things that I know you’re really great at is email marketing. We have several clients right now doing email marketing campaigns, and I wanted to get your advice on that.

Brian: OK.

Eric: I wanted also to kind of let everybody out there know that we love to use you for conversion optimization on either email or website optimization campaigns. If you guys are already a client of ours, call me, talk to me about working with Brian because if you want to convert your website better, this is the guy to talk to.

Brian, let’s focus a little bit on email marketing. I know you like to do it. I subscribe to your email list. I get it all the time. It’s got great content in it. How do you make that work? What’s the secret sauce to emails?

Brian, I’ll tell you the problem with email is there’s a recipe that the Wizard Academy which is an interesting and enigmatic business communication school talks about, Roy Williams says that salience equals frequency times relevance. Salience is that magic moment when somebody gets what you’re saying. They move your brand into their chemical memory as opposed to digital electrical memory.

Eric: OK.

Brian: Salience is important. It’s what builds brands, relevance and frequency. These are the challenges in email, relevance and frequency. To be relevant, I have to understand something about my folks, my higher subject matter experts who write that content.

Eric: Right, right.

Brian: What we end up doing is getting into this monthly newsletter that has three fully written articles, and that doesn’t give us the frequency that we need. I think blogs are where it is, and this has really worked for me. Every time I have an article some place else, I do a little blog post about it, and my blog drives my email marketing.

Eric: You mean, you write an article somewhere else, or you read an article somewhere else?

Brian: I’ll write an article on Search Engine Land or Clicksy. Rather than link to that, I will write a blog post summarizing one of the things or excerpting. I’m using my blog as the content source, and then I have what is called a RSS to email service. Mail Chimp, AWeber offer these things.

Eric: Yeah, we like Mail Chimp actually ourselves.

Brian: Once a week, weekly I would consider the minimum for effective email.

Eric: OK.

Brian: Once a week, Mail Chimp goes and looks at my RSS feed. If there’s new blog posts, it puts them into a template and sends it to my list. It manages my opt-outs and everything for me, and it’s hands off. I write the blog. I go about my business, and Mail Chimp takes care of that once a week. I’ve got relevance because I’m dealing with articles that I have written specifically for my audience. I’ve got frequency in getting something out once a week.

Eric: Right.

Brian: That’s creating that salience where people get what I’m about, a thought leader in my space.

Eric: And they think, conversions, Brian.

Brian: That’s exactly right, and it works very well for me. Don’t get wrapped around the axle on doing your monthly newsletter. Do your weekly blog post and summary.

Eric: Do you like doing it once a week where it aggregates your one to three posts, or however many you needed, or the other option at Mail Chimp is, I know, that you can have them do it every night. Every time that you do a post, it’ll pop. What do you think of that? Is that too much?

Brian: The rule of email is this. You send as often as your content allows. As an extreme example American Airlines sent me five emails within the space of an hour.

Eric: But you were going to miss your flight if you didn’t get it.

Brian: They were giving me flight updates, so I wanted that. That’s high relevance.

Eric: Right.

Brian: If you can’t write, I know some entrepreneurs who can write a daily email. They’re short. They’re punchy, but they’re interesting, and they keep people on their list, writing daily.

Eric: I wish I could do that.

Brian: Every one of them has an offer in it. It works for folks like that. You decide.

Eric: OK.

Brian: A blog is usually a wide range of topics, so I think once a week or twice a week is probably sufficient. If you try to do that daily, it’s probably a little more hit, miss and less relevant. A daily thing might be a little stretching it, but I did a test last summer which I had four, eight days sent an email every day.

And so, I got to study what we call list shake. People who don’t want that are getting off, but they’re probably not buyers anyway.

Eric: Right. Maybe, that was OK. Let’s talk about a couple of the high sticky points in emails that I think about a lot is the headline in the email, and then also the call to action email. Do I need to have a call to action in my email, and then, if so, do I need it at the top?

Do I need it at the bottom? How strong does it need to be? Should it be like my landing page, like a PPC landing page where I have a really clear button that says Do This Now? Or do you suggest, like your emails, in fact, are probably a little softer where they’re a little more on content, and I’m not driving you to buy something right now. In email, it depends on what you’re selling.

Brian: Email is a promotional… We’re marketers. It is a promotional medium. We do want to promote.

Eric: Right.

Brian: I recommend the best place to put offers is in the copy. You write your email or you write your blog post such that it ends up going in with this offer, that offer you can have what we talked about.

Eric: Right.

Brian: That’s the most important place. If you put it in the copy, you’re going to have higher click-throughs.

Eric: OK.

Brian: There’s a little blindness. I use a two column thing. There’s an offer blindness on the right column, if you see a two column newsletter, but I’ve had good luck with them. I suspect that I could have better luck in stream ads.

Eric: Right.

Brian: In a one column format which is what I’m seeing more of from the informational newsletters, but yet, you need to be promoting. You need to be letting them know you have products to offer, and I don’t have a lot of products to offer because I sell mostly services is why I don’t push it a lot.

Eric: Yeah. Well, we’re in that same business, but most of my clients have something to sell so it’s good to know both. Well, good. Thank you, Brian. That is always informative. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us a little bit.

Brian: I appreciate the opportunity.

Eric: I want to repeat here at the end. If you guys want to improve the effectiveness of your site and we’re building traffic to the website and you’re one of our clients, call me. Let’s talk a little more. I’d like to get Brian involved in your campaign and really improve the conversion rate that you’re seeing on your site or in your email campaign. If we’re going to work with anybody, it’s going to be Brian on conversion optimization. I really appreciate your time, Brian.

Brian: Thanks for having me.

Eric: Thanks.

Eric and I are both acquaintances of Brian Massey, the Austin-based e-mail marketing expert who bills himself as The Conversion Scientist. Since we met at PubCon, I’d received email updates from him. It had been a while since I’d gotten any conversion tips from Brian, but I just figured he was busy.

One day, Brian sends out an update noting his absence:

This summer I’ve generated some of the best content ever on the things that make business websites generate more leads and sales… it’s just been a great summer. Through writing, audio and video, I’ve laid out some of my most useful and actionable work, all of it online and all of it open to everyone.

The problem is, I didn’t tell you about it. I haven’t sent out an email all summer.

That was September 7. Brian soon rectified this situation in a big way- I was getting something new from Brian nearly every day, and it was making me crazy. I had to say something, so I hit him up on Twitter.

He responded with concern:

We chatted back and forth for awhile, I assured him it wasn’t the quality of the content, but the frequency of the emails that was bothering me.

And then, the master stroke:

Sliiiiick. Super slick. Because my gut reaction to this tweet took me from being crabby about getting too much of a good thing to saying “whoa there. I’m on the what? I don’t want to quit being special.” I wanted to stay on the -personal- list. Who cares how many people are on it, it’s the -personal- list, and I want to be on it. With one phrase, I felt like an insider. Why would I want to defect to the weekly email when I’m on the good list? The one that must get the best, most timely information, otherwise why even have a special, personal list? That settles it, I am gonna stay on that list and that is THAT.

I’d forgotten about all the email; it wasn’t about email anymore- I felt valued, and I wanted to stay that way. It wasn’t until the next day or so that it really sunk in how precise and effortless the language was there- Brian retained a potential lead with one well-crafted sentence. It’s a trick he’s employed more than once- a recent email about an upcoming conference where he’d be speaking included the line “I’m not supposed to share [a discount code], but, hey, you are a personal acquaintance.” “Acquaintance” sounds professional, but “personal” adds warmth without being phony- a far better option than acting like the members of your mailing list are your buddies. Brian Massey, through his actions, taught me a powerful lesson in captivating an audience and retaining a lead.

Well played, Brian. Well played.