Creating effective subject lines

The goal of your email subject line is to get your reader to open the email. Period. Tell the reader what’s in the email so they may determine if it’s relevant to them. Set a clear, simple expectation of what’s inside the email. For maximum open rates, use action verbs like “download” in your subject line and keep it shorter than 50 characters.

Of course, other factors affect your email open rate including list quality, prior connection, and permission to send. Table 18-1 shows email open rate by company size from a study performed by email company MailChimp.

Check your email open rates and CTRs against companies of similar size to yours to see how your email marketing is performing. Additionally, check out Figure 18-1 to see further findings from the MailChimp study, noting the different lengths of keywords that correlate with higher clickthrough rates. Your subject line lengths affect email open rates. Have you ever heard of the subject line “dead zone”? Apparently, subject lines with lengths between 60 and 70 characters have dreadful open rates. Who knew?

Even more interesting is a study by Adestra that found subject lines with fewer than ten characters had an astounding open rate of 58 percent! In fact, Adestra has a cool subject line keyword checker tool (http://subject-line-checker.adestra.com). (See Figure 18-2.)

In addition to creating short, clear, directive subject lines, a 2014 study by HubSpot and Litmus discovered using the following words in your subject line increases open rates for one-to-one emails:

• You
• Thank
• Tomorrow
• Download
• The first name of recipient

Getting to the point

Like your subject lines, writing short body copy works better. So keep your emails short.

The goal of your email copy is to create a click. That’s why you measure email clickthrough rates. Shorter emails have better CTRs. In fact, although emails with fewer than 500 characters have better open rates, 360 characters is ideal (see Figure 18-3).

What does that mean for you when you’re writing your emails and email templates?

• Keep your body copy short
• Be clear and directive as to the intent you wish the reader to take
• Provide an obvious CTA, linking to relevant content

The 2014 HubSpot/Litmus study discovered that people said they were more likely to click on an email with an image. The actual data, however, culled from millions of sent emails, showed differently. In other words, people like images, but they don’t increase CTR. In fact, images can actually lower your CTR. Does that mean you shouldn’t use images in your email? Not necessarily. It does mean you should A/B test your email CTRs with and without images. If you do use images in your email copy, smaller images are better than large images, generally speaking.

Empathizing with your personas’ needs

When you performed a persona study during the diagnostic phase, you learned some things about your target customers. The persona studies identified pain points and needs. Because most of your inbound emails are follow-up emails to people who have performed some type of onsite conversion, you may have learned even more about those customers. For instance, if you’re a roofing company and you followed-up with a customer who downloaded information about a metal roof, your follow-up emails would specifically address that information, so you’d have a record of it.

It may seem hard to write an empathetic email while keeping it short so here’s a simple process for communicating effectively:

1. Acknowledge the reader.
2. Identify the desired action.
3. State a benefit for performing that action.
4. Provide an obvious CTA.

Figure 18-4 displays one of my own follow-up emails. Note the email’s brevity. The subject line is short (16 characters). The body copy is fewer than 500 characters, and follows the procedure above. The link displays in bright orange, making it clear this is the next action to take and nurturing the lead towards the next logical conversion point, which is taking an inbound assessment survey.

Broadcast emails

Broadcast emails are messages sent to a large quantity of addresses obtained from a business partner or from a purchased list. Purchased lists may or may not include addresses from people who agreed to share their data this way, so be careful if you’re conducting email marketing from this source. Lists obtained from business partners should have addresses that were collected knowingly by the recipients. If a company’s expressed written policy includes a promise not to share the customer data they’ve collected, ask the business partner who originally cultivated the list to broadcast your message on your behalf, or, alternatively, send a co-branded message that’s supported by you and your partner company. Broadcast emails from purchased lists with no recipient opt-ins are not based on permission marketing and therefore are inconsistent with inbound marketing practices.

Workflow emails

Email workflows are series of emails designed to send individualized emails to segmented lists created by previous onsite actions. In other words, the type of email you send is dependent on:

• Who the email recipient is
• Which product purchase path the prospect is currently navigating
• What actions the recipient performed on your website
• Where your recipient is in the Lifestyle Loop
• The order of each email in your workflow series

Workflow emails may be sent during the nurturing stages of engagement and encouragement, so it’s appropriate to form workflows for both marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs)

Customer relationship management (CRM) emails

Prewritten CRM emails create efficiency for your sales team. Additionally, by prepopulating follow-up email templates with relevant sales information and accompanying links, your company creates consistent brand messaging.

It’s easy to create prewritten email templates in CRMs like Salesforce so your sales team need only point and click to send out a follow-up email. In this instance, it’s usually fine to personalize your follow-up messages, since prior contact has been established. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute found the average office worker spent over two-and-a-half hours per day writing emails! The time saved by not having to start each new email from scratch greatly impacts your sales team’s follow-up capacity. As an inbound marketer, consider writing these template emails and populating them within your company’s sales CRM. When you collaborate with your sales department, the content will be more meaningful, engaging, and representative of your brand. These email templates are editable so individual sales people can add in a couple of personalized lines in the email copy.

Personalized emails

Personalized emails are the most engaging type of email you can send, and they’re also the most likely to be opened and clicked by the recipient — because they’re, well, personal. When email recipients know and trust you, they’re more likely to open your email and respond. Knowing when to begin communicating personally with emails is important for two reasons:

• It builds a more trusting relationship, encouraging two-way communicating.
• It provides more relevant messaging, allowing you to accommodate an individual’s needs

Designing emails for reaction and reentry

Your emails are designed to create website reentry to cause a reaction inside the Lifestyle Loop. Effective emails complete the loop, connecting a lost visitor who’s exited your site in the past with a current website reentry resulting from that lost visitor opening your email and clicking through to your website content. Design workflow emails with CTAs linking back to appropriate website reentry points

Understanding recency and frequency

Recency refers to how quickly you communicate with a customer after an action or event and how close in time each email in a workflow is sent. For instance, sending a “Thank You” email within seconds of someone downloading content from your website demonstrates a high recency.

Frequency is how often you communicate with your customers. Frequency is how often you send emails. Sending too many emails too quickly is perceived as spammy. If you don’t send emails frequently enough, however, you may lose connection.

The key is to build your workflow series with enough time in between emails that you’re seen as being communicative but not abusive. MailChimp discovered that 60 percent of emails are opened within the first 36 hours of receipt, after which time the open rate tails off dramatically. (See Figure 18-5.)

Using this as a rule of thumb, a workflow series sending an email every two-to-four days seems acceptable. If your sales cycle is very short, you may send emails daily, but do not send multiple automated emails within a 24-hour period (with the exception of “Thank You” emails). For example, the typical sales cycle to purchase an automobile is 72 hours after a consumer demonstrates interest, so your entire workflow needs to be built within that timeframe.

Building an email workflow series

Designing and building email workflows requires preplanning. Segmenting email delivery by associating an automated system of email deliveries creates reattraction and reengagement opportunities. Marketing automation software and email delivery software help automate this process, and I highly recommend using those tools to help with your inbound email marketing efforts. Here are some guidelines:

• Create workflows based on your product pyramid.
• Write email content based on the “4 P’s of Inbound Marketing.”
• Create workflow rules so recipients receive the most important emails; emails that are relevant or in the most recent product purchase path.
• Deliver your emails in a timely and meaningful manner.
• For prospects with multiple conversions, create a workflow hierarchy, suppressing inclusion in less important email workflows, thereby avoiding inbox overload for your recipients.

Figure 18-6 shows an example of a simple automated email workflow compared to the complex automated workflow in Figure 18-7. Downloading an e-book is a middle-of-the-funnel conversion that requires some demonstrated interest, but not a lot. This new lead may or may not be an MQL, but it’s certainly not an SQL. As such, it requires nurturing toward the next conversion.

The complex workflow consists of five emails sent over an eight-day period. Upon completion of the survey, the lead is considered an SQL and receives a follow-up sales call. This workflow series includes an immediate “Thank You” email and periodic follow-ups.

Completing the survey requires more commitment, implying greater demonstrated interest. That’s why this workflow has more frequency than the simple workflow. The recency of the complex workflow is coordinated with the follow-up procedure with your sales department, which consists of telephone follow-up immediately and on Days 1, 2, 4, and 6. By integrating the automated workflows with the sales process, the workflow avoids potential conflict and over-communication by sending too many emails.

Creating email workflow rules

The workflow examples in Figure 18-7 show you how workflow can become complicated very quickly. Overloading a prospect’s inbox with emails is not conducive to inbound marketing best practices!

Here are some basic rules for workflows:

• Clearly define the difference between MQLs and SQLs.
• Understand your sales team’s follow-up procedure and build workflows around it.
• Create workflows for each product purchase path.
• Design a hierarchy of workflow rules so that prospects receive emails from only one product workflow, unless the prospect specifically requests to receive additional emails by opting-in to additional product workflows.
• Design your workflows according to the recency and frequency that makes sense for your target customers and your product purchase cycle length.
• Suppress individual recipients out of less important (further from desired action) workflow emails.

Knowing when to stop

Email workflows aren’t designed to deliver emails forever. If the customer purchase cycle is one year, it may be fine to send an email once per month, but don’t overload someone’s inbox by sending daily emails. You’ll want to periodically cleanse your list of non-qualified recipients, bounced email addresses, and, perhaps, those who haven’t opened up an email for a designated time, signaling disinterest. In that case, either keep them in your newsletter or remove them from your email lists.

Additionally, the CAN-SPAM Act requires you provide an “Unsubscribe” option on non-personal emails. Do provide an easy method of unsubscribing and don’t be tricky about it. If someone wishes to unsubscribe, why would you still attempt to push your message to that individual? As an inbound marketer practicing attractive marketing, you wouldn’t. So, provide an “Unsubscribe” option and don’t make it necessary for the recipient to click several more times with unclear buttons or tricky multiple choice options.