Stop sleeping on email:
3 ways to wake up your email writing
Let’s be real: Email can be a snooze. Think about how many emails you ignore every day. (Full transparency, this writer’s personal inbox is at capacity, and at least 90% of those emails are unread.)
But when you snooze, you lose, which is why crafting a cut-above email is so critical.
(And, no, before you ask, email’s not dead. Far from it. Done well, it’s an incredibly effective part of your digital marketing strategy.)
No email can promise a 100% open rate. No email can guarantee a single click. But every email can deliver something your reader wants. So, let’s give the people what they want:
1. Make them feel important
“They want to talk to me?” (That’s your recipient when you use this little trick.)
Take a tip from Maria von Trapp and start at the very beginning: your from line. Making your email “from” the company CEO, VP, etc. increases open rates in B2B almost 30% thanks to a little curiosity and ego boost.
2. BUSINESS in the front
Give it to ’em straight while grabbing interest. The perfect subject line is a combo of information and intrigue. It’s a tall ask for a short line of text, but we have a few tricks up our sleeves:
- Brackets — Kick off with [brackets] around the keyword or phrase. It keeps the main thing the main thing and makes it easy for the reader to see a) why you’re here and b) what to do. This tactic is currently boosting B2B open rates 21%.
- Personalization — Use your target’s title or function in the subject line. For example: “5 top tools for IT professionals,” “What security leaders need to know in 2023,” etc. Open rates are jumping 34% with this move right now.
- Trends — Take advantage of current interests! Track what’s trending and use it to your advantage. In June, words like “Chat GPT,” “Q4,” and “AI” boosted opens by about 20%.
3. DELIVER THE GOODS
Congratulations! Your from line and subject line worked! They’ve opened the email! Quick — deliver the goods, fast, before you lose ’em. Two things that will help:
Spit it out. Keep your email body short and sweet. More than 75 words in a paragraph? Your click-through rate (CTR) just dropped by a third.
Tell ’em what they’ve won. A call-to-action (CTA) button that tells folks what to do in a way that shows the benefits (i.e., what do I get out of this?) can snag you a 24% higher CTR vs. a commitment statement.
Not sure where to get the latest email trends?
People change, and so do email trends. What’s working today might not be what works next month. That’s why our team loves Jay Schwedelson, founder of SubjectLine.com and president and CEO of Outcome Media, a division of Worldata Group.
Outcome Media provides free industry metrics based on email research conducted on over 6 billion transmitted messages annually. All stats mentioned here come from Outcome Media research results published within the last month in SubjectLine.com’s weekly newsletter, the Jay’s Scoop newsletter, and on Jay’s LinkedIn page. Following along helps us keep our email tactics fresh and our inbox fun.
Here’s the bottom line:
A great email puts the ball in your target’s court and sets them up for the play. What happens next is up to them.
And while we wait, we stay on our grind: Define the audience, do the research, and draft killer emails. And, if we do it right, deliver a message that makes ’em wake up and smell the coffee.