Businesses everywhere are beginning to appreciate the benefits of email marketing.
It is a form of marketing that can be done cheaply and on a massive scale. It’s never been so easy to get your message out to your market place.
But not only is it fast, its results are also measurable.
With today’s sophisticated software you can track who opens your emails, what links they click on within the email, what they do once they’ve made that click. This kind of transparency helps you hone your email marketing, constantly improving it to make sure it’s giving your customers what they want.
Testing the effectiveness of your email marketing
As a copywriter I work with a number of clients on their email marketing campaigns. One of the hardest things to get right is the subject line. That is the one thing that will determine whether your email is opened—if they won’t open it, you can’t sell them anything or build a relationship with them.
Creating magnetic subject lines isn’t easy, it’s futile to pretend otherwise. They can take a lot of time to develop. You not only have to think about who you are sending it to (and what will trigger them to open it) but also the words you use, as you don’t want them tripping any spam filters. In a previous article I looked at 10 Words That Will Make People Open Your Email – these are powerful words that will help you boost your open rate.
That’s all well and good but the only real way to work out how effective your subject line is, is to test it.
Many people will split test by sending one group of recipients an email with one subject line and a different group another subject line to see which one has the most successful open rate.
But there is another way – have you ever considered using social media to test your subject lines?
This is something that I’d never thought of until I’d read BlueSkyFactory’s blog and in particular their post on How to use social media to boost email marketing open rate. Christopher Penn tells us how he used Twitter to help work out how effective a subject line is.
Do your Twitter followers resemble the demographics of your email marketing list? If so why not try it out, it could give your email marketing quite a lift. If you decide to give it a go please come back and let us know how you got on—it would be interesting to hear your feedback.