Three ways to improve your email marketing results!

One thing I know for sure, after sending millions of emails and watching the results, if you don’t think about your reader first and above all else, you will lose their interest.

I attended an email marketing conference recently and one presenter who was supposed to be talking about email deliverability issues couldn’t help but talk about his company.

It went on and on. Actually it was only for 10 minutes but for the whole 10 minutes I could only think of one thing. Why does this matter to me? It doesn’t really. I want to hear about the topic I came to hear about.

And guess what? That is exactly what your reader thinks about when they are reading your email.

Here are three guidelines to help you write email people want to read and most importantly act on.

1. Think like a magazine. What is the key to selling magazines? Well, one of them is writing good headline copy on the cover. Read any magazine cover to see what I mean. In email the subject line is exactly that. It is the headline copy which tells your reader why they should open up your email.

Pretend your audience has a list of 20 emails to choose from when they open their email. Why would they open yours? What’s in it for them? What reason should they read it? Split testing shows that a great subject line can improve open rates by 100%.

The more people that read it the more people can act on it.

2. Make it short. People are pressed for time. You got them to open up the email. Now get to the point. Long stories are wasted. And to be honest people just don’t want to hear about your company BBQ. Tell them what you want them to know. Use bullet points.

The faster you can get the information out the better chance readers will take the action you ask of them.

3. Give it a personality. Your readers want to feel special. They want to feel like you are talking to them. Write in a style that sounds just like you would say it in person. The kiss of death for a customer email is for it to sound like a textbook especially when the email address is info@example.com, dry, uninteresting, impersonal. Give it a voice, your voice. Sign your name. Use a picture.

Take a look at the last few emails you sent to your customers? Could they improve by applying these three steps? And if they improve, could you get better results?

What would a 50% improvement in sales be worth to you?