Let’s Dissect an Email

November 20th, 2008 — Copywriting, Email, Lessons

It’s rare that I receive any kind of new or noteworthy email. Most of them all look and sound the same. I imagine your inbox looks the same as mine.

That’s why one of the biggest challenges in email marketing (just like direct mail) is figuring out

How to Get Your Email Opened!

You have two snippets of text to work with: your name and your subject line.

Personally, I believe the most valuable of the two is your name.

Here’s why…

If you deliver valuable content to your readers… and you develop a relationship with them… they will actually WANT to read everything you send them.

They will open your emails and read them because they know you, like you, and trust you. And they trust you will continue to deliver the kinds of content you’ve developed a REPUTATION for delivering.

Now, a name can be an asset or a liability. If you abuse your reader’s trust… and you abuse it repeatedly… she will unsubscribe. Or worse, she will bad-mouth you in public forums whenever the subject of email marketing comes up!

So, as much as possible, build trust. Become known for delivering value. Treat your name as an asset. Build relationship equity. If you are in this for the long-term (and you’re not just “churning and burning” your prospects), then this strategy will be very effective for you.

And this brings me to

Email Subject Lines

What subject lines work best? What should you avoid?

Well, I can’t speak for all markets, but I can tell you some things that have worked well for me.

1. Be provocative.

Whenever I put some emotion into my subject lines or write something unexpected, my emails get more attention.

Example: “3 Signs You Should NOT Be a Copywriter”

Since I am a copywriter… and I have an ebook about how to get clients as a copywriter… this is definitely an unexpected subject line. As a result, it got a high open rate.

2. Make it look personal.

A quick caveat: Deceptive subject lines are illegal. So do not try to trick your readers. That’s a no-no.

Still, I think making email look personal is a good strategy for getting emails opened — so long as the strategy is not over-used.

Example: “re: copywriting clients”

When I used this subject line, a reader told me re: means “reply,” and as such was deceptive because the email wasn’t a reply.

I’d never heard this before. I always thought re: meant “regarding.” It is used all the time in print letters. “Re: Your Recent Purchase” or whatever.

No matter whether you choose to use Re: or not, the principle still holds. Personal emails get opened more often. You could just use lower case letters and that might be enough. Or you might say something like “hey, need your advice” if you’re conducting a survey.

3. Use the word “Download.”

This may sound weird, but in test after test, anytime I start a subject line with the word “Download,” I get a ton of opens.

Example: “Download Ben Settle & Ryan Healy Interview”

If you have a PDF report, audio recording, or video to offer your list, use the word Download. If your experience is anything like mine, it will improve your open rates.

4. Mix things up.

In #2, I suggest making your emails look personal. The trick is to avoid over-using this strategy.

Most of the time, I like to use clear subject lines with Initial Caps.

Example: “How to Write with Authority”

Simple. Straightforward. And it works.

But over time using the same subject line format can cause your readers to become blinded by familiarity. Which is why I like to change things up every now and again.

That’s when I will use lower case letters or ask a question or throw in some symbols.

Example: “am I crazy for doing this?”

If I’ve been sending out emails such as the first example (How to…) and then I send out something like this, it will get much more attention.

5. Issue a command.

Instead of trying to gain your reader’s interest, it’s good to occasionally issue a command. Again, this works well only if you don’t over-use it.

Example: “urgent message (open immediately)”

Obviously, I can only say something like this a few times a year. Not everything is urgent. But when something is genuinely urgent, issuing a command is often better than using a promise-based subject line.

And if you don’t have something urgent, you can still issue a command. For instance, one of my most-read blog posts simply said, “You Have to Read This Now.”

I gave no indication as to WHY my reader needed to read this… or even WHAT he was going to read about. And yet it still commands (demands?) the reader to take the action you request.

6. Tell a story about yourself.

Anytime I use a story about myself, I get higher open rates. Of course, it has to be interesting and relevant to my readers.

Example 1: “33 Things I Learned in 2006″

Example 2: “How I Achieved a 7.14% Conversion Rate”

Everybody loves a good story.

By inserting yourself into the subject line with the word “I” you naturally tap into your reader’s curiosity — and his desire to read a good story.

Notice that there are two things at work here. I’m promising a story and a learning opporunity at the same time.

7. Make a compelling offer.

Back in May 2008, I ran a special offer centered around my birthday. I sold a copy of a physical book for $7. And that price included shipping.

This offer sold 85 books and generated a couple upsells on the back end. The two subject lines I used were:

Example 1: “My Birthday Is This Week — Here’s a Gift for You”

Example 2: “Save a Back: Buy a Book”

The trick is to make your offer compelling. That’s the first goal. Then, if possible, make it fun. Give a reason WHY you’re making the offer (i.e., it’s your birthday).

Win 1,000 Gallons of Gas?

Now, most corporate email is boring and completely fails as a direct response medium. But today I was pleasantly surprised by an email USAA sent to me.

Subject: Enter the 1,000 Gallons of Gas Sweepstakes.

Here they have combined two of the elements I discussed above. They are issuing a command (”Enter”) and making a compelling offer (a chance to win 1,000 gallons of gas).

Here’s a screenshot of the email:

As far as corporate emails go, this one is really good.

They’ve got a clear, compelling offer. They’ve got a deadline. And they’ve got a call to action.

What’s more, they’re tapping into the internal conversation many Americans have had about high gas prices.

Not bad!

The bottom line: Email marketing can be both powerful and profitable if you do it right.

What tips and advice do you have?

-Ryan M. Healy

Email Software

Are RSS Subscribers Worthwhile if they Don’t Visit Your Blog?

Blog Promotion, Featured Posts, RSS 133 comments

“Why do bloggers put so much focus upon growing RSS subscriber numbers to their blog if most of them only ever read your content in Feed Readers and don’t visit your blog?”

This question (or variations of it) hit my inbox 3 times in 24 hours from different people so I thought I’d tackle it as a post instead of individual replies.

Let me start by saying that this problem can be frustrating. You see your RSS subscriber number growing by your actual visitor numbers remain steady - as do your comment numbers. It can actually feel like you’re wasting your time - I remember myself feeling kinda like this guy when I first noticed this happening to me:

Image by Sybren Stüvel

However all is not lost.

There are a number of points that I’d like to make in responding to this question about RSS subscribers not visiting a blog. I hope that they give those facing this problem a little hope, encouragement and also a few ways forward.

1. A subscriber that never visits is better than a one off visitor who never returns

I had one blogger recently tell me that he’d removed the option to subscribe to his blog via RSS from his blog because he didn’t want to ‘give away’ his content. He wanted people who read his content to ‘pay’ him by visiting his blog (and earning him money from his advertising) and he saw RSS subscribers as ‘freeloaders’.

My response to him was that I’d rather have a subscriber who rarely visits my actual blog than a one off visitors who never returns because they have no way of keeping in touch.

While a subscriber might not actually visit your blog they are a powerful connection to have. My reasons for this will hopefully become evident in the points that follow.

2. Every post you put in front of a subscriber is an opportunity to reinforce your brand.

RSS subscribers are opting in to receive your content. When they hit ’subscribe’ they are putting themselves inside your sphere of influence and are asking you to teach, inspire and communicate with them.

Each time you hit publish on a post and a subscriber sees something that you’ve written you have the potential to deepen the relationship, trust and influence that you have with your subscriber. While this might not have an immediate pay off in terms of advertising revenue - it can have a long term ‘pay off’.

3. RSS subscribers are Influencers

RSS is used by a smallish percentage of the population (around 11% at latest reports).

While the percentage may be smallish - I have a suspicion that they are a reasonably tech savvy and influential bunch of people. I’m guessing here - but I suspect that those who use RSS are also likely to have blogs themselves, they’re more likely to be into social networking, messaging and bookmarking tools.

This makes RSS readers a potentially very influential audience - capable of spreading news of your posts and blog throughout the web very quickly.

4. Making the Mind shift from Traffic to Influence

When I started blogging one of the main indicators that I looked at when measuring the success of my blog was traffic. If I had a day with lots of visitors I was happier than if I did not have anyone visit my blog.

While traffic is still important to me - I’ve noticed lately that I’m checking my visitor stats less than I used to. These days I’m increasingly interested in ‘influence’.

I don’t mind so much if someone reads my content on my blog, in an RSS reader or in some other tool - what matters to me is that people are reading it, that in doing so they interact with me, that they are drawn into some sort of ‘relationship’ or ‘community’ around the content.

My reason for this is that I’m finding that while traffic can be monetized directly - influence is actually a more powerful (and potentially profitable) thing. Let me explain more in my next point.

5. Influence can Lead to Profits

More and more bloggers are discovering that while direct income earners like advertising are great - that there’s also incredible potential for bloggers to earn an income through other more indirect income sources. Making money ‘because’ of a blog rather than directly ‘from’ a blog is possible in may ways including consulting, writing books, running training and workshops, selling products, landing other paid writing gigs, speaking at conferences etc.

The more people that you have some kind of influence with the increased chances of being able to monetize that influence in one of these indirect methods.

A subscriber might not be visiting your blog each day but if you provide great content on a daily basis to them you can bet that the day they decide that they need to hire a consultant on your topic that they’ll come knocking on your door.

6. Other Monetization Models for RSS

Indirect income is not the only possibility for RSS. There is also RSS advertising - this industry is still in its infancy and while isn’t hugely profitable using tools like AdSense I’m hearing bloggers reporting that it’s a growing income source for them.

The other great opportunity for income from RSS subscribers is affiliate programs. This taps into point #5 above - when you have ‘influence’ or trust established with readers an affiliate program can be very profitable.

7. The challenge of drawing subscribers into your blog

Just because someone subscribes to your blog does not mean that they’ll never visit it. In fact RSS subscribers can be among your most regular visitors to your blog if you draw them into actually visiting it.

I won’t go into a lot of techniques for this in this post but using techniques like asking questions, running polls, interlinking posts, writing ‘best of’ lists and more techniques can draw subscribers into visiting your blog on a daily basis.

Read more detailed tips on getting RSS readers visiting your blog.

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Blog Marketing

Twitter Tips for Beginners

At this point TwiTip is firmly in ‘beta’ (if not alpha). It has a long way to go in terms of content, design and almost every other aspect of building a blog. I generally would get a blog in a much better state before going public about it (and I wouldn’t launch it on a Sunday night or on US election eve) - but I thought it’d be interesting for readers of ProBlogger to see the development of TwiTip from the ground up.

So far you have not missed much but let me give you a catchup on what I’ve done so far:

Hosting

I’ve set it up on a very basic hosting package (GoDaddy of all places - I just wanted to get it up quick and as it grows I’ll move it to a more reliable service).

Design

I’m using the Thesis WordPress theme (I’ve long wanted to test it on a live site and I have to say that it’s amazing).

My blog design skills are poor but Thesis is easy to set up and configure - it is also set up really well for SEO which is cool. I plan to give the design more personality in time (I’ll get a designer in to overhaul it) but in the mean time Thesis is a great option and will be a good basis for the design tweaks that will come).

So far I’ve developed a few WordPress ‘pages’ that take the design beyond the default set up. These include an ‘about’ page, contact page and a ‘write for TwiTip’ page.

Content

I usually would have at least 5 posts live on a blog before launching it but in this case have 3 (including one welcome post). I would normally also have a couple of posts in reserve for the next few days. Again - I’ve gone public early as a bit of a case study but will get another post up in the next 24 hours to keep a little momentum building.

My plan with content for TwiTip is for it not to be a daily update initially. I’ll start out with 3 posts a week and work towards more as I find my feet (and perhaps as I bring on other contributers). My focus in the early days will be quality rather than quantity.

Promotion

So far all I’ve done promotion wise is Tweet that I’ve launched TwiTip. That was a nice start because the audience on Twitter obviously have an interest in the topic and it was retweeted quite widely through the Twittersphere pretty quickly.

Other than the Tweet announcing the new blog (and now this post) my only other strategy for finding new readers has been more about on site ‘hooks’ - highlighting subscription methods and encouraging people to track with me on Twitter and RSS.

Analytics

I’ve set up Google Analytics on TwiTip. While it is a little slow and not great for analyzing stats as traffic events are happening on your blog in real time it’s such a solid tool that it was a no brainer of a choice.

Setting Up RSS Feed

The only other task that I’ve completed so far is to set up the RSS feed over on Feedburner. So now the feed is not a ‘TwiTip.com’ one but a Google/Feedburner one. I find that it is best to do this on day one to keep eveyrone subscribing to the same feed. I’m yet to see how many people have subscribed and don’t plan to add a feedburner counter in the short term (in the past I’ve waited until subscriber numbers hit 1000).

Things Still to Do

I’ve done a few other miscellaneous things including adding a ’subscribe to comments’ plugin, a ‘tweet this’ plugin and adding a sidebar polling tool. There is still a lot to do to get TwiTip up and running to a point that I’ll be happy with it! These include:

• RSS to Email Subscription Option
• Email Newsletter Setup
• Getting a proper design done (I won’t do a custom one in the short term but it does need a header/logo and some styling etc)
• Monetization - I’m not going to monetize this straight away but it won’t be far off. I need to consider my options here.
• Plugins - there are quite a few plugins that I want to get installed, test and use.
• Writers - I’ve had so many offers for guest posts already that I’m at a point of saying no to more as I can’t process them all. Over the coming weeks I’d like to develop a system for accepting and managing contributions.
• 
  

This is just the beginning of the list (and I’m sure many of you will come up with other suggestions in comments below). The more I do the more I think of. For this reason I’m going to take my time with this launch. I’ll continue to document my progress here on ProBlogger as I go.

Update - a few people have been asking how readership has been so far. It’s a little difficult to tell at this point, I’m yet to see an update of how many Feedburner subscribers there are. Google Analytics shows around 1600 visitors for day 1 (but that’s not finished updating for the day). The vast majority of readers have come from my tweets (and the retweets of others. There have also been a few visitors from facebook (where my tweets get republished) and a few others from StumbleUpon where there are a few reviews/stumbles already). I’m yet to see full stats yet and will update it at some point.