INTRODUCTION:
A real common challenge is how to ensure you get the most emails opened every time you send something. Here’s a few tips in this short video.
VIDEO:
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello it’s Mitch Tarr, President of ZinMarketing.com. I’ve got another email marketing tip for you today. I called this one the Trojan horse just to give it a little clever name but the question I get asked quite often is; “How do I get my emails opened?” Today I’m going to you show you.
Here’s an example of an inbox, this is my inbox and there’s a whole bunch of stuff in it. Certainly not everything in it. I personally tend to get 60-80 messages a day, which is not unreasonable. Some people get a lot more and some people a lot less.
I’ve just given you a snapshot here of my messages and here’s the three things.
There’s three things you have to get right and have to be in sync and match up and be powerful and compelling all at the same time. Here they are; the very first one is the “from.” Who is the message from? What does it say on the from line when the message shows up.
When people are rushed for time and they’re trying to get through their messages they’re going to check out who it’s from to make sure they’re not missing anything from anybody that they’re expecting or anybody that’s important to them or anything that’s critical to them right at that point. That’s going to be important. Get that right. Then match that to the subject line.
A lot of people have the impression that the subject line alone is going to make the difference; it will make or break your email. It doesn’t, it’s just one of three things.
I’ll come back to that in a second. But this one here it says, “Summer Gould matched your search: Mentions of @ZinMarketing” I can see this is just kind of like a notification email. The subject line, it’s a standard one. It looks the same every single time I get one of these. Then the next thing we see, the third leg of the chair is, and this one is really important and most people ignore it.
The first sentence or first paragraph in an email gets displayed in a preview pane like this. Because it’s displayed people have an ability to make a decision. To decide whether they want to dig into the email.
You have a chance to sell them or convince them at this stage that they should read your email. Let’s take a look at the next one. Walter’s Golf, so I sort of know who they are. I’m on their list of course. I take a look, a little closer look, at their subject line: “Last Chance To Play in This Weekend’s Pan Am.”
Now that might get my attention because I don’t want to miss out on the last chance. Maybe this is something that it really is the last chance and I don’t want to miss it. It’s going to get my attention. Here is where they dropped the ball and why this preview pane is important.
This public announcement message has no purpose at all in the first line of a preview pane. It says, “To view this email as a web page, click here.” It’s kind of like legal.
If you look at the next one from “Touch of Modern” their first line of the preview pane says, “To ensure all emails get delivered successfully please add.”
The Marriott one from the Golf Getaways; their’s says, “View in a browser window.” These are really, really poor efforts at the first piece of marketing language or copy that goes in an email. This is why copy is so important. You have to have the subject line match up with the first sentence in the email and they work together to try and draw you into the email. Because you have choices.
You can go in and look at these things or you can just pass them by or you can delete them in order to get them out of the way so you can get on to the other stuff you are working on.
These are better. These at the bottom. If you look at the from address, subject line and the first sentence, there’s kind of a story. The first one from Brandon Burchard stands out a little bit. I can read it and see that it’s different. It’s kind of got my attention.
I’m not sure what it’s about but it’s drawing me in. The next one from Groupon Getaways, I know who they are, what they’re doing. The subject line is giving me where the getaways are which gets my attention if I happen to be interested in Bisbee, or Las Vegas or San Diego which are some of the items in the subject line. Then the first sentence gives me the fact that there is a deal.
View all Getaway deals $55 Value $99. Right away it’s telling me that there’s money to be saved. That all makes sense. That’s what you expect to see from Groupon.
When you’re doing your messaging, and you want to get an email opened, make sure that these three things sync up and are done well and you’ll have a much better chance of getting people into your message than if you say something like, “To view this email as a web page click here.” That just really has no place in marketing text. Here’s what you can do.
Make your from address personal. Make sure people know who you are. It’s okay to put your name and your company name in the same from address just in case people don’t know or connect the dots between the two.
You can’t always assume that people know who you are and where you’re from at the same time. Write a compelling subject line. In future tips I’ll be telling you exactly how to do that. Make sure the first line is matched up to the subject line so when people look at it in the preview pane they can see that they should maybe take a little closer look at this message and maybe pay attention to it.
That’s it. That’s the ZinTip for this week. I called it the Trojan horse and it’s based on how to get your email opened. Of course you can always have us do the work for you or you can take our training programs. Go and take a look, there’s a phone number at the bottom if you want to chat with us directly. Have a great one and we will see you at the next round.