“Don’t sell your product in your subject line.”

And this is a good piece of advice. I can easily count on my hands the number of times I have gone to my email to find a subject line which tells me everything about the product. By telling me so much so soon, instead of stirring my interest, I know straight away not to read it.

However throw in a subject line that agitates your curiosity. That makes you go ‘what’ you can attract a whole new audience to your email marketing.

If like me, subjects lines are not your forte, then the following tips will help:

1. Write headlines without mentioning the product once
2. Offer them scandalous/shocking pieces of information
3. Personal the subject line i.e ‘Can’t believe what you have done
4. Make claims/offer statistical data they cannot ignore

Now these may not always work with an existing mailing list (depending on your market place); however if you are trying to attract new clientele using a different mailing list, any one of these can help turn your email from a ‘delete me’ to ‘read me’ message.

Try first writing yourself some generic subject lines which can be applied to any scenario. When you have got a good selection (approx 10), try incorporating themes from your product into the subject line and create a further 10 subject lines. With a collection you can feel confident that you have got 10 email topics straight way which you can use to produce new emails and new content.

Failt to pull them on this one simple sentence and not only will they fail to read your email, but you will fail to convert them into a sale too.

As one copywriter once told me, a 2 million mailing list means nothing if you haven’t got the trust of your subscribers or have got nothing of value to offer them when you message them.

Bombard them with sales message after sales message and they will get fed up and will begin deleting your emails on sight.

So what do you do? You give them an impossible to ignore subject line, which will have them clicking on open without hestitation.

The best tricks I have learnt are the following:

1. Give them a shocking result – a statistic/figure that they will want to know more about i.e. ‘93.2% of mothers swear by it…’ – the first question your mailing list is going to ask is ‘what do they swear by?’

   Using this curiousity, they will open your email. The only point that you need to remember here is, that you cannot ignore this statistic. Whatever you mention within your subject line needs to either remain a theme within your email or act as a starting point to enticing them towards your product/service

2. Ask them a question – now I don’t mean ‘How are you?’ These question has to draw their curisosity as well and make them want to know the answer. For example if you to ask them ‘Have you had much success with these?’ they will then think ‘With what?’

   In most instances you will be writing emails to a mailing list that has subscribed to your newsletter, so if you specialise in weight loss, property, mens health etc, they will expect your emails and subsequently your subject lines to relate to this niche area.

Your subject lines though are only part of the battle. Yes you have got them to open your email, but that doesn’t automatically mean they will read all your email. Write poor sales copy and you could potentially lose them on your first sentence!

That is why it is incredibly important to make your sales copy strong, enticing and fluid.

Some clever tricks I have learnt to prompt readers on is the use of the following:

• … – these 3 simple dots may look like nothing, but subconsciously they prompt your mind to continue reading. In many ways, your mind views these 3 full stops as a sign that your sentence is incomplete.

  Now I feel that these can become increasingly extensive if done constantly, but time them right throughout your copy and you can experience this effect of naturally pushing them down the page

• Be grammatically incorrect  – starting sentences with ‘And’, ‘But’ ‘Therefore’ or ‘Also’ is a great way to keep consumers reading. Similar to ‘…’ consumers naturally assume you are continuing with the last sentence, so will keep reading to find out the outcome of the sentence

All of these are only a starting point for improving your open rates and ultimately your sales, but in the next few weeks I will expand on this subject.

If you have got any questions in the mean time, send me a message and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Rowena xx

Here are some I quickly mocked up for some popular websites you can easily find on the web:

This second one in particular, I originally copied the logo and header shape. However after introducing it to Photoshop I was able to make the curves consistent on the top and botton of the header and introduce new text.

The first header on the other hand was created from scratch. Using the pen tool and my mouse I was able to establish the curves exactly how I wanted them, as well as use them to shape the head of the keys. One of the clever things about photoshop is that when you use the pen tool, you can easily correct/modify the shape using the Direction Selection Tool and change the shape of the curves.

Now getting these curves to look smooth will take practice and a lot of zooming in to help smooth out the lines, but it is definitely worth the effort once you finally achieve the end result.

So give it a try and see how you get on.

Michelle

I hope they too can offer you the same inspiration that they have offered me over the years, and find real enjoyment in their work.

In no particular order:

1. Jeff Gardner
2. Bob Bly
3. John Carlton
4. Randy Charach
5. Jesse Forrest
6. Michel Fortin
7. Mike Jezek
8. Dr. Harlan Kilstein
9. Dan Lok
10. Yanik Silver
11. Grady Smith
12. Joe Vitale

These are just a handful of the top online marketers around and they have each earned a strong reputation due to their commitement to write powerfully strong copy, email marketing and campaigns.

If you are interested in looking further into their background and work, you can easily find them all on the web by typing in their names.

If you find any others, send us a message and we shall discuss them here.

Enjoy xx

Today we thought we could mix it up abit, by offering you the opportunity to ask you what you would like us to write about. Copywriting, PPC, SEO, development, email marketing, web design… if you have got a question about any of these areas that you are just dying to find out more about, then please feel free to leave us a comment here and we’ll look into it.

We know from experience how frustrating searching the web from marketing tips can be, so we want to make this search easier.

Simply leave us a comment below detailing what you would like to know more about and we’ll write a dedicated post just for it.

It can be about anything: producing killer headlines, choosing the right graphics, where to find affordable imagery, tricks to ranking first on top search engines… give us a shout and we’ll get onto it.

Rowena xx

Now I am not so much talking about a general ‘Hi, how are you?’ email, I am on about the ones that can come off as an advertisement to spam filters.

I was once doing an email marketing campaign for work and sent a test version to my home email. Now whilst my home email was already programmed to recognise my work email, low and behold my newsletter ended up in the Junk Folder.

As a copywriter the email templates I am generally given have all been thoroughly tested to ensure that they don’t get recognised as spam. After all what would be the point of sending out an email to your products mailing list if none of them were going to get it?

The best online marketing company’s always test their html codes to make sure they get through. Yet even still, their deliverable rates can still be less than 80%.

So what is happening?

The reality is your content is setting off the spam filters.

On most marketing tools they are you a widget that enables you to check for spam words. My most unusual experience with this tool was when I was told the word ‘laugh’ is a spam word.

It is incredible what words crop up. Beyond the obvious of ‘free’, ‘buy’ and ‘financial freedom’, some of the others that pop up are unusual.

Now if you are incredibly serious about increasing your emails delivery rate I recommend using this spam check. Using a rating of 5, should your email cross the threshhold of 3.9 and above there will be a risk that your email won’t deliver.

If that is the case, look through your email and try to implement alternative words in their place.

Admittedly you will never get it down to 0, but 1-3 is enough to fill confident that your mailing list will recieve your email.

Give it a try and see if it makes a difference.

Good luck.

Rowena xx