Here are 5 tips on creating effective subject lines that will avoid the spam folder:
Keep it short and to the point: A subject line that is too long or unclear can easily get lost in the clutter of a crowded inbox. Keep your subject line concise and focused on the key message you want to convey to your audience. Avoid using spammy words or phrases: Spammers often use certain words and phrases in their subject lines to trick recipients into opening their emails. Avoid using words like "free," "earn money," or "click here" in your subject line to avoid being flagged as spam. Personalize your subject line: Adding the recipient's name or referencing their specific interests or needs can increase the chances of them opening your email. This personalization shows that you have taken the time to tailor your message to their specific needs and makes your email more relevant to them. Use numbers and symbols wisely: Including numbers or symbols in your subject line can help it stand out in a crowded inbox. However, be careful not to overdo it, as this can make your email look spammy and decrease the chances of it being opened. Test and optimize: Testing different subject lines on a small sample of your audience can help you determine which ones are most effective in getting more clicks to your site. Use the results of these tests to optimize your subject lines and improve your overall email marketing strategy. Here are examples of subject lines that could be considered spam - avoid these formats: "Earn $500 a day with this secret method" "Click here to claim your free gift" "Get rich quick with this amazing opportunity" "Special offer: 50% off all products" "This is not spam: Important information inside" "You're a winner! Claim your prize now" "Your account will be closed unless you respond" "Amazing breakthrough in weight loss" "Join our exclusive members-only club" "Miracle cure for [disease] discovered" Here are examples of subject lines that would not be considered spam - use these formats to improve your results: "Join our webinar on [topic] this Wednesday" "Limited time offer: 20% off your first purchase" "New blog post: [title]" "Invitation to our [event] this weekend" "Check out our latest [product/service] review" "Get the latest industry insights with our newsletter" "Thanks for subscribing to our [blog/newsletter/etc.]" "Join our community and receive exclusive offers" "Don't miss out on our [event/promotion] this month" "Customer service update: [important information]" "Limited time offer: 20% off your first purchase" "New blog post: [title]" "Invitation to our [event] this weekend" "Check out our latest [product/service] review" "Get the latest industry insights with our newsletter" "Thanks for subscribing to our [blog/newsletter/etc.]" "Join our community and receive exclusive offers" "Don't miss out on our [event/promotion] this month" "Customer service update: [important information]" "Get a sneak peek at our new product line" "Join us for a free webinar on [topic]" "Limited time offer: 15% off your first order" "Don't miss out on [event] - register now" "Your feedback is important to us" "Thank you for being a valued customer" "Introducing our new [product/service]" "Limited seats available for [event]" "Exclusive discount for [company] employees" "Join us for a special [event/sale] this weekend" I hope these tips are helpful and provide useful examples for your own email marketing. Get in touch if you would like to work with me on improving your overall email marketing strategy and results. Establishing effective communication and nurturing a relationship with customers requires tact, respect, and a deep understanding of the value of the recipient's digital real estate. Here are 7 key things to keep in mind:
Email marketing should be seen as an opportunity to create and nurture relationships with recipients. Consent is merely the starting point, not an excuse to flood inboxes. By respecting the recipient's space, and approaching them with the intent to understand and value them, businesses can make their emails stand out. Here are 6 checkpoints you can use to evaluate your current digital marketing strategy and establish whether it is still on track. Most of the time, Digital Strategies require adjustments over time. Messages may need to be refreshed. Images may need to be changed. New challenges may have appeared in the competitive landscape that need to be addressed. There are many changes in your business environment that require adjustments in your digital (and offline) strategy.
Here are 6 important signs you can track that will tell you what kinds of changes are needed:
An important thing to note is that, as you can probably tell from the descriptions above, each tactic of your digital marketing strategy supports the business and all have internal links to one another. Understanding these links, and learning how to manipulate them to improve results over time (via testing and changing tactics and elements within them for optimization), will lead to overall better results for your digital marketing spend. It will also lead you to make reasonable decisions about the future of your spend, and which channels really help you connect to your customers at every stage of your product/service life cycle. A thorough, impartial Digital Marketing audit is a good place to begin so decisions can be based on data, balanced by the knowledge and experience of your staff and your customers. Understanding Customer Loyalty as Confirmation Bias
A business can understand customer loyalty as a manifestation of the positive side of Confirmation Bias. This bias is inherent in people's mental model, and is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories. “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects.” — Francis Bacon You can think of confirmation bias in a negative manner, as a way to prevent you from understanding the world correctly by blinding you to a proper understanding of the evidence in front of you. And you would be correct to look at it in this way. In the real world of contradictory ideologies, Confirmation Bias is the mental approach that allows two people with opposing views on a topic to see the same evidence and come away feeling validated by it. Unchecked, it can create a dangerous thought bubble that isolates and destroys your ability to relate to the world. In the context of this conversation, however, we are looking at the positive side of Confirmation Bias. (The technical term for this use of Confirmation Bias is Apophenia). Looking at the Shapes of Clouds and Mountains Confirmation Bias has a positive aspect to it. It has to do with patterns and reassurance. The mind is designed to seek patterns in the world and it will create and sustain them automatically, often from evidence that does not support such patterns. For example, people who see figures in the shapes of clouds are using a form of confirmation bias to ‘trim’ what they see to belong to a category of things they know about (sheep or cows or whatever object is on their minds at the time). The trimming process removes whatever elements in their mind would interfere with the creation and maintenance of this mental image. The ‘mental trimming process’ is reinforced via confirmation bias to make the image become clear in their minds, even though it does not exist in the real world. In the case of looking at the shape of clouds, this is a very mild process and does not involve confrontation. Someone else may disagree with an individual about the shape they see in a cloud, but this will likely not become cause for a duel to the death. However, It is possible for one person to transfer to another person the ability to see the same object in a cloud by telling them about it in a cooperative manner. By describing the shape of the cloud in terms of the elements of the object desired, one person can ‘make’ the other person see what they believe they see in the clouds. The same process also happens when viewing the shapes of some mountains. People describe shapes and can transfer this description to another person’s view of the same mountain so they both ‘see’ the same thing, even though it is clear ‘the thing’ they are looking at is not really a part of the mountain (or the cloud) in the least. Triggering Confirmation Bias To Create Customer Loyalty To apply Confirmation Bias within a customer centric Digital Investment Plan, a business can add a ‘crazy’ element to their marketing approach. By committing a potential and/or existing customer to perform this ‘crazy’ action, the business triggers Confirmation Bias, as the individual will be naturally driven to justify their action to others. The elements of the Digital Investment Plan come into play to create and maintain the justification details that a customer can use to confirm their beliefs about the action they have performed. The trigger for confirmation bias can be a story told about the product and its details, or a story about how the product fits in the customer’s world. In other words, the trigger can be a real thing or a story that organizes the world into a shape that helps explain a little part of the world. Depending on the type of customers in the business target audience, the elements may be 'crazy' or they can be as simple as a higher price than average to trigger a justification discussion. By designing the Digital Investment Plan from the start to include these triggering elements, a business can run effective campaigns to create confirmation bias driven discussions between customers and non-customers, establishing a high probability of getting loyal customers to stick with the product while at the same time having them advocate the product (in the same way that people share their description of the shape of a cloud) with others. Source Highlights: Confirmation Bias discussion from Science Daily Pareidolia: Seeing Faces in Unusual Places Being Amused by Apophenia Principles Behind The Digital Customer Investment Approach to Customer Centricity
The term Digital Customer Investment (DCI) separates its concepts and objectives from more commonly used concepts like Digital Operations, or Digital Marketing, or Digital Solutions. Any of those phrases carries with it a strong direct transactional intention that bleeds into the activities defined for Digital Customers. This pre-defined intention can act as a prison preventing innovative thinking in digital customer investment. To open a perspective to different approaches that are customer-centric in nature, I have defined digital customer investment along the following principles:
A properly applied Digital Customer Investment Marketing plan will support most of these principles from the start and use them as the basis for the creation of the messaging, measurement and implementation of the plan. See if this sounds familiar:
Going forward, we need to drill down into the customer priorities and engage a deep dive into our big data storage. This action will attack the issues we have found in customer satisfaction, which have not been addressed by our previous representatives. Our stakeholders are concerned about the lack of action in this matter, and want everyone to have a clear idea of the end of play situation we want to create, as well as the leverage we can bring upon the customer to deliver the new numbers that our growth planning requires. Fortunately, our thought leadership research group has come up with a set of actionable ideas that allows all of us to get in the tent and get a group aha effect going, so we are all clear on the end result we are trying to obtain, as quickly as possible. Once you catch your breath after reading the paragraph above, you may appreciate the importance of verbal clarity when it comes to creating a plan to improve customer value recognition inside a business. This is why the Digital Customer Investment Plan is called precisely that. It has a purpose that is easy to understand. It does not take a lot of energy on the part of a team to 'get' the objectives the plan provides and the methodology it uses. It should be self-evident. This accessibility, once the plan is created and agreed upon, allows the team to spend its energy focused on the things that matter, and not in getting into endless meetings to discuss 'what it all means' and 'what we are trying to do.' Organizations that are small or medium sized may find this transition simpler because their focus on the customer may be more accessible to them, with fewer layers to work with and fewer years of history 'of how things are done around here' to work through. Recognizing customer value may seem obvious, but it can become fragmented because individual areas of the organization view customer value through their own internal lenses. Accounting may view customer value in one way, while sales views a customer in a different, sales-related way, and of course, marketing views the customer in its own particular way. Over time, this fragmentation sets in and prevents a clear view of the customer as someone who does not attend all the meetings and does not understand the internal history behind this or that decision. This is one way that organizations lose touch with their customer base. Once this behavior sets in and is organizationally valid, the interests of the customer become secondary to the interests of the individual departmental groups laying claim to the 'real' value of the customer. The integrated Digital Customer Investment Plan is designed to avoid these issues before they become chronic. A few years ago we met a founder during one of our engagements. He had placed, at strategic locations throughout the company, several sayings and perspectives that, he hoped, would blend into a cultural view of where the company's principles stood and what were the overall lines that the company culture would not cross.
One of the lines we read was the title of this post: "It's not our money, it is the customer's money." The sayings and their positioning made us ask: can you drill a customer culture or do you teach it? At its most transactional level, Marketing is based on repetition. Most everyone who has been exposed to television commercials can recite a jingle engraved in their minds by sheer repetition from watching their favorite programs on television. Over time, the jingle has stuck, which is great for branding in the most transactional sense: you remember the brand that created the jingle (if it is mentioned in the jingle, which it should be). However, does remembering the brand also mean that you remember the culture associated with the brand? And, if you remember the jingle, does it help you select a product from a shelf, be that a mental shelf or a physical one? Or does the marketing simply becomes part of the mental furniture of the individual and is not brought up as part of the decision-making process for the product at the time of purchase? Drilling a customer-centric culture and applying it to your marketing needs brings up the same questions. You need a certain level of repetition to make the marketing message stick. However, how do you add the elements of a customer culture to your repetitive message so that these elements will 'activate' at the point of purchase, so the customer, when faced with the decision to purchase a product, will consciously bring up the marketing information as an argument in favor of your product, vs. the competition. What is the combination of messages that has the best probability of success most of the time in terms of getting to a conversion? The solution isn't to simply repeat the same phrase over and over again and hope that it sticks in someone's mind. That only leads to the superficial, transactional element of remembering. To go deeper, you have to add a sense of purpose to the activities that your company performs. This demonstrates to the customer that you know what to do with the money that they are about to give you. If they agree with this purpose, and if they see it implemented clearly throughout the organization they can see, then, it is more likely that the repeating message will stick in the mind and is used as a definitive argument for generating a purchase. The combination of messages we are looking for is precisely that: a purpose-transactional combination that, when added together over time, creates a bridge between the customer's action of paying for a product, and the satisfaction they derive from receiving it from your company. This satisfaction, which includes the satisfaction with the product or service purchased, translates into the kind of loyalty that enables people to advocate for your brand and turns them into something more than just a single transaction on a spreadsheet. It makes your customers a partner in the purpose that animates your company in the first place. |
AuthorDaniel Loebl is a Digital Marketer with over 10 years of experience. He is ready to tell your story via email. Request an appointment. Archives
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