When you are planning an
email marketing campaign, there are two
important issues to be addressed. The first issue is ensuring that your
email marketing campaign gets delivered and the second is persuading
the recipients of the email marketing campaign to open the emails and
read them.
Email Marketing Campaigns - Robots
Despite the
scare headlines about the death of email marketing, it is alive and well
and email marketing campaigns are still fighting a running battle with
their arch-enemies - the filterbots. These are the poorly trained
robots that filter out legitimate marketing emails and correspondence
from your relatives but persistently deliver enormous amounts of rubbish
right into your mailbox.
You have probably had the experience of
signing up for an email marketing campaign - you know, the sort that
offers a useful training course or a series of interesting articles -
and then finding that you only get about half or two thirds of the
promised emails. Sometimes a ten part
email campaign mysteriously
disappears after part seven or you receive all of the email marketing
campaign except parts 1, 5 and 9. It always seems random but we are
told that the filterbots are trained to seize mail containing certain
words, symbols or combinations of words and symbols.
The really
infuriating thing about the bots is that they seem to be unable to
distinguish the difference between a junk email marketing campaign and
email from a contact in your personal address book. How dare these bots
decide on your behalf that you will not receive email from your
excitable friend who uses double and triple exclamation marks in
correspondence! Ok, multiple exclamation marks are vulgar but being
eaten by robots seems rather a harsh punishment for a mere lapse of
taste. The filterbots, although not particularly intelligent, are
cunning: they leave no evidence, they devour every scrap of the mail
they steal, so you can't prove they have committed the theft. You can't
fight the bots so you need to weave a cloak of invisibility for your
email marketing campaigns.
Anyone doing research in the hope of
creating a successful email marketing campaign will come across advice
on how to get past the filterbots and will discover in advance that
certain words and phrases must be avoided. These dangerous words
include "money back", "100% satisfied", "money-back guarantee" and
"order today". So whilst the author of an email marketing campaign will
have this advance warning, such matters will not have come to the
attention of your Granny. Granny will wonder why you didn't reply to
her email asking for your advice on her proposed stair lift purchase
even though she told you in her email that the company offers a
guarantee and she wanted to send off her order today. If Granny is
deaf, she won't be able to sort this out with you by phone, and the
filterbots will have created a terrible rift in your relationship.
Email Marketing Campaigns - Humans
Armed
with your knowledge of the bots' weakness for certain fodder, you can
make sure your email marketing campaign contains no tempting words that
would turn your campaign into a series of tasty bot snacks. So, you've
done your research, you know the words to avoid and you have found a
neat tool that will read your email and tell you if you have
accidentally used a "bad" word in your email marketing campaign. The
next thing to consider is getting the emails read by the recipients.
Having gone to a lot of trouble to plan you email marketing campaign and
robot-proof it, you want to give the emails the best possible chance of
being read. With one eye on the banned word list, you need to think of
the human beings who will receive your email and create subject lines
that will make them want to read each email. A tall order but not
impossible. There are things you should do and things to definitely
avoid. Your email subject heading should (a) stand out, (b) engage the
recipient's interest, (c) relate closely to the body of the message and
(d) not look like hype.
To make your email marketing campaign
stand out, you can indent the subject by using
">>>>>>>>" or "__________" or "********" but
don't be tempted to use exclamation marks or all capital letters. These
will catch the human eye but they will also attract the scrutiny of the
filterbots who will most likely gulp the email down without even
bothering to look further than the subject line. Don't be tempted to
put L@@K in the subject heading of a business email, that sort of thing
is fine if you are writing to a friend but it does not convey a
professional image.
To engage the recipient's interest in your
email marketing campaign you can employ one of the following techniques:
(a) state a powerful benefit - "xxxxxxx Satisfies Your Need for xxx"
(b) pique curiosity - "xxxxxxxx Has Uncovered the Secrets of Success"
(c) write your subject line with a news angle - "xxxxxxxx Launches
xxxxxxxx For Those Who Want to xxxxxxxxxxx Fast!" (d) offer Immediate
Gratification - "With xxxxxxxxxxx, you can start xxxxxxxxxx before the
sun goes down tonight"
The subject line of your email must be
relevant to the body of the message. If you want to annoy people and
ensure they never open another email from your marketing campaign, pick
an important sounding subject line - eg "Urgent - Re Your Account" for
an email that has nothing to do with any account held by the recipient.
People do not like to be misled or tricked and will not forgive you if
they think you are trying to fool them. Using an irrelevant title to
get someone to open an email is tantamount to lying to them. People
will remember this behaviour and might even block all future emails from
you. Words such as ": time-sensitive, only 3 days left, powerful,
offer about to expire, exclusive, limited, secret" are known to attract
attention but should only be used in appropriate circumstances, ie when
they relate to the contents of the email.
Create an email
marketing campaign subject line that doesn't look like hype. This has
to be the hardest one of all as it is subjective. What looks like hype
to one person will look like a reasonable proposition to another. A
perfectly genuine statement will be suspected hype to an overly cynical
person. The first thing to do is to avoid anything that you personally
think looks like hype. Ask yourself if it would convince you if it
turned up in your mailbox or if you would immediately hit the delete
button - if you can't even convince yourself, you will be causing a
similar reaction in other people. Never make over-inflated claims in
the subject line, make sure you can back up any statements you make. If
you can do this and still create an alluring title for your email, you
will have a good chance of getting your email marketing campaign read if
it gets past the filterbots.
Email Marketing Campaigns - "Shoes Slashed Whilst Lions Roared"
"Shoes
Slashed Whilst Lions Roar" is my favourite email subject line of all
time. I believe this is an example of a near enough perfect subject
line for an email marketing campaign. It has all the elements: the
words stand out from the run of the mill titles, it engages the
recipient's interest, it relates closely to the body of the message and
it does not look like hype.
This subject line was used in an email
marketing campaign run by a mail order company I had previously used
for purchasing online. I might or might not bother to read emails from
the company depending upon how busy I was. I couldn't resist opening
this email because the title intrigued me. Although it was easy to
guess that the "Shoes Slashed" would relate to reduced prices on
footwear, I couldn't figure out where roaring lions would come into a
clothing and footwear catalogue, so I simply had to read the email. The
email carried details of special offers on footwear (as anticipated)
and English Lions Rugby shirts, which were apparently a roaring success.
The dramatic sounding subject line was, in fact, directly relevant to
the body of the mail and nothing about it bears the tell-tale mark of
hype.
Email Marketing Campaigns - Final Word About The Beginning
The
first mails in your email marketing campaign are the most important so
should be especially carefully crafted from the aspects of both
bot-proofing and engaging human interest. If you can get the first
couple of emails delivered and read, people who are interested in what
you have to say will recognise your name and will want to read any
further emails from you that arrive in their mailbox. It is also a good
idea to suggest in the first couple of emails that the recipients
should add you to their "white list" to ensure they don't miss future
important mail. All this might not make your email marketing campaigns
100% filterbot proof but it is the best mere humans can do in this
particular battle.
Copyright 2005 Elaine Currie
