- David Smith
One Secret to Successful Email Marketing is Crafting a Great Subject Line
Good marketing is an essential part of building your business. And one of today's most effective marketing methods is promotional emails sent to your opt-in list.
These are established customers who have given you permission to email them with future offers, or prospects who have signed on to your mailing list (typically while registering for your newsletter or some other free premium offer.)
You can reach these prime prospects effectively via email, but you have to be smart about your campaign. Your prospects are bombarded with messages every day, so you have to cut through the clutter with a subject line that will arouse enough interest to get your email opened. The average person scanning through their inbox gives about 2 seconds of attention to each subject line when deciding whether is is worth their time to open it. The subject line is the most critical component of your email! If the subject line is lame, your email will never be read. Top copywriters repeatedly stress the importance of the headline in a promotion. They suggest spending 80% of your time working on the headline -- it is THAT important. Your subject line will make or break your email campaign. Advertising pioneer John Caples declared, “If you have a good headline, you have a good ad. If you have a poor headline, you are licked before you start.” Decades of marketing research confirm his assertion. Caples wrote some of the greatest advertising headlines in history, and most of his headlines fell into three major categories: 1) SELF INTEREST - Headlines that appeal directly to your prospect's desires, such as "Lose Ugly Fat - An Average of 7 Pounds a Month." 2) NEWS - These headlines attract readers with the promise of new and useful information, such as "Car Insurance at Low Cost, If You are a Careful Driver." 3) CURIOSITY - These types of headlines are usually combined with a news angle or a story that arouses the reader's interest, such as "How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling." It pays -- literally -- to invest the time crafting a subject line that will catch your prospect's attention and get them to look at your offer. Read the list of John Caples' 106 All-Time Great Headlines.