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It's important to keep in mind that the subject line is the first thing that the recipient will see, so it should be attention-grabbing and relevant to the content of the email. You may want to test out different subject lines to see which ones perform the best. Here are 24 subject lines for New Year's emails for an ecommerce business:
I hope you take these examples and modify them to suit your A/B testing in emails during the festive season. A/B testing is the best way to learn how to optimize your email campaigns over time. If you would like to work with me on your email campaigns, get in touch! 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. 5 Ideas To Bring Your Wholesale/Retail Product Business Into E-Commerce
The current business landscape is wrecking long-established direct-to-physical retailer and physical retailer-to-consumer relationships. Both types of relationships are affected because consumers are reluctant to shop in physical spaces, either because they are concerned about crowds, or because it involves a considerable amount of thought consideration that, before, was not even a blip on their radar. The situation is uncertain: no one knows when the current physical retail environment will recover, and what shape that retail environment will take once the situation, as eventually will, stabilize, and the ‘new normal’ is established. What we do know today is that many consumers, because of lockdowns, uncertainty about facemask rules, and a general desire to avoid crowded spaces, have turned to their phones and computers to do the kind of casual shopping that would normally support a group of stores in a physical retail environment. If your business depends on selling products to wholesalers, who then resell them to physical stores, or if it relies on physical locations, then your revenue is likely to be lower than it used to be at this time of year. And you need to go where your customers have gone. The Role of Online Wholesale Retailing The answer has been to complement the physical business by moving or kick-starting the business online. Some brands have responded by creating a space on Amazon or similar large online retailers. These double as digital wholesalers, with the advantage that you are likely to regain sales, but your business does not gain any of the advantages of digital sales due to individual online marketplace restrictions and marketing constraints. Inside one of those marketplaces, your business is also faced with a large amount of one-click-away competition, automatically generated by the Amazon or similar algorithm that places different sellers side by side for comparison. This usually leads to price competition that drives profitability down to its lowest sustainable point, and sometimes below. This situation is different from what is encountered in physical retailing, where the appearance of similar stores within a restricted physical area (a street, a boulevard, an open air mall), has the effect of keeping a customer interested in a purchase through the exploration of multiple physical locations about that particular product. One retailer’s approach has a good chance to find its mark through the random distribution of individuals physically circulating through a shopping street without having to worry (too much) about the pricing or setup of a neighboring storefront. The randomness involved allows for a fair distribution of purchasers, over time. Online marketplaces provide ‘naked competition’ that comes down usually to brand recognition, pricing, and convenience. The intangibles about the brand, if they are not supported by large advertising campaigns, are lost in this kind of transactional environment. Beyond Wholesale Online Retailing In contrast to focusing only on the sales that a large online retailer can provide, with their attendant limitations, some brands have decided to open their own online shops by building websites and establishing a relationship with their customers, one-to-one. In terms of long term sustainability for the business, this approach - which uses all the tools available for digital sales and focuses them all on your business and its customers - offers the best opportunity to not just survive the current difficulties, but to provide a springboard for consistent, profitable growth into the future. This approach may not exclude the use of a large online marketplace as a ‘home base’ for sales. Instead, it complements it because it makes a brand smarter about its customers and their connection to the products on offer. An example is the ‘old’ Apple Computer Company, the one that existed prior to the current incarnation. That company had a close relationship with its customers. In the days before social media and the internet, Apple customers literally had a face-to-face opportunity to talk to people inside the company via the MacExpo in San Francisco, at least once a year. Not only did the company get to connect directly with people who purchased their products, but they had a rich environment that, if studied properly, provided excellent clues as to what the purchasers of Macintosh equipment would likely want next in their products. The same can be said for the days when Apple’s products were the object of discussion in specialized magazines, where editors well-versed on the products provided excellent criticism and offered (unpaid) ideas that could find themselves incorporated into future product plans. This was the method behind the ‘go where the puck will be, not where it’s gone’ idea that sometimes surfaced in the discussions about Apple’s direction with its products. You don’t get the sense that the current version of Apple Computer has a two-sided relationship with its customers. Not through their online presence, their phones, or their online stores. Individuals may feel connected to the products as they use them, but this is on their own - an empty connection unsupported by the company itself and its customer management system. It is a fandom, not a symbiotic relationship. Apple is not learning from its customers anymore (unless it is through loss of sales due to failures of equipment - as with their ill-fated attempt to ‘innovate’ on keyboards that backfired). Apple now is like many other companies, working through a process of imitation of other companies like itself in a competitive environment, but without a path of its own. It is a behavior similar to the murmurations of bird flocks. Each bird looks to the one next to it for guidance while flying but none of the flock is aware of the overall shape of the flock itself in the sky and no individual bird contributes to the outlines of the shape except during the process of following the others around it. Carving Your Own Path For Your Brand You carve a path of your own for your brand by engaging, listening, and learning from your customers, and taking that environmental information into your company to tweak your products, their presentation, and messaging, and transforming them, little by little, into something unique that may not be predictable from day one - but that as a goal, has a better chance to stand up to any competition into the future because it cannot be easily imitated: people may imitate the externals of your brand, like knock-offs of famous brands you see selling on streets in many cities, but they will not feel right to the consumer you want to have as your regular brand user. You don’t have to be a guru about your brand and its products - but you do have to care about the people who will spend money to obtain them. That expression of caring, of being willing to understand why people purchase what you sell and how they use it, holds the key to what made the old Apple Computer special, while the new Apple Computer just feels mundane. Steps to Avoid Being Mundane - First: Interact With Your Customers Non-Transactionally To avoid being mundane, the crucial thing is to find a way to be relevant to some decision that someone is going to take during their day. It might be almost every day, as a grocery store does, or it may be occasionally, as a computer maker does. To avoid being irrelevant, you need to understand the decisions that are important to your customers - about your products, and about your brand presence, and their timing in taking those decisions. A well structured, set of automated email flows that can track specific customers either browsing or purchasing products on the site and then (with subtlety), tease out their reactions after several transactions, can help in this type of situation. This is usually supported by a strong survey-based system that is segmented and structured to appear at different moments during the customer journey. If you already have a list of individuals in your email system, then building this approach requires careful segmentation based on product and other parameters that can be added, slowly and steadily, to the customer profile as they move through their journey. The parameters and the particulars of the journey are individual to the brand, even in transactional environments. Some brands may require customer education, and so a parameter that indicates their level of engagement with relation to that education would be helpful in segmentation, for example. Second: Test Your Merchandising on Email Another way that helps you be relevant to your customers is merchandising your products in a manner that is relevant. What makes a presentation ‘relevant’? If you get customers to react to it, share it on social media, and/or share it with their close circle of acquaintances, then you know that you are on the right track. You may use some of the information from the previous step to begin this type of exploration. However, a website may prove to be too inflexible for that kind of work, and a landing page, too ‘salesly.’ Instead, a flexible testing mechanism based on multiple email layouts, merchandising messages, and presentations can yield valuable information that can then be translated into the more permanent environment of the website both in terms of copy and images. After all, email delivery mechanisms have been designed from the start to yield data on everything their user touches, from clicks to views to engagement via open rates. Three: Expand Your Learning To Multiple Channels As information is coming into the company, and it is being put to use in everyday communications via email and the merchandising on the website, it is important to use the knowledge for testing on third party platforms as live presentations, videos, or series of related-theme postings. This need not be done via paid advertising, but using the relevant information gleaned from the ongoing activities to find another non-transactional way to connect to customers online via social media channels. This can be giveaways, or live demonstrations of the product, or any other activity that can be delivered only by the product-owner. Every product has a story to tell and you as the temporary owner of that product can tell that story in many ways and find an audience that is interested in them. This is how the search for relevance in the consumer’s life can take shape. Four: Tell Your Product's Story But Focus on Its Relationship To The Customer - And The Testimonials That Back It Up As much as you may be internally fascinated with all the ins and outs of your company's process, chances are that customers, existing and potential, may not share the same type of fascination. Customers like to know that you have thought about them when you are working on your products: how will they feel when they use the product, how will they react when they receive the packaging, how will the product make their lives better. Content marketing that is focused on benefits and the process of delivering them makes for a solid bridge between your brand and your customer base. The existing customer base will be reassured that they have 'backed the right horse' vs. the competition, while the potential customer base will be tempted to take a chance on you based on your content. This is where testimonials play an important part in your product's story: as the last chapter in the product's promise. Any brand can state whatever they want about their product (within legal limits), but only customer testimonials can validate those claims through impartial user opinions. Your content marketing, communicated through all channels, but especially through email flows as part of a 'conviction flow', enhanced by testimonials, has a good chance to open doors for your brand via referrals and relinking. Five: Keep An Open Mind - But Focus On The Ultimate Goal Regardless of how much time we put into the discovery and analysis work, there is no replacement for the process of learning how to apply it to the individual audience involved. There are no shortcuts. True, there are some problems that are already solved - for example, instead of creating an entire e-commerce system from scratch, you can use Shopify to create a perfectly suitable store that you can then customize as you need it to make it your own. You don’t need to worry about many elements that used to be cause for concerns for people like me when the internet just began to be commercialized, where nothing was known, and you had to create your shopping cart from scratch for your store. Your particular design problems can be resolved as the store takes shape and you have more income to better manage the details. Your ultimate goal will likely be to create customers who enjoy using your products, come back for more of them, and tell people about them. But not every customer you gain will hit all those notes. And not every customer you gain, even with all the effort to connect to them, will be open to a non-transactional connection to your brand. People compartmentalize, and you have to make sure that you understand when they don’t want to connect with you, as much as when they do. Keeping an open mind and continuing the learning process will ensure that your brand pursues the ultimate goal of establishing itself in a crowded marketplace with a self-replenishing pool of customers coming and going over time. The myth of Sisyphus tells the story of a man punished by the gods to forever roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again once he got it to the top.
Rather like looking at your email every day. The most important real estate in an email is not in the email itself. It is the recipient’s inbox, where your email subject line will take its place among many others that arrive every day, for many reasons, fulfilling many purposes. The success of your email campaign depends on your successful management of your place in your recipient’s inbox. If you are old enough to remember the 1990’s, you may remember that, prior to the advent of the commercialized internet, the printed catalog ruled the physical mailbox. Imagine if every Shopify or boutique store on the web was delivered to you as a semi-large print magazine, with glossy images, itsy-bitsy copy dedicated to telling you a story about a product or summarizing the features of the same for your entertainment. For a while, mailboxes all around the US were flooded by prospecting catalog companies that had purchased lists from one another or from list brokers and were trying their luck to expand their audience to meet ever higher business goals. In those days, physical mailboxes were considered an amazing expanding infinite space, capable of taking in as many catalogs and selling publications as could be crammed into them by a mail person. A physical mailbox has one clear advantage over a digital one. If the mailbox owners are likely to clear the mailbox, entirely, every time they open it. You end up with Mailbox 0 every day, and you don’t have to worry about leaving stray letters or magazines in the mailbox. Normally, you take them all out and you make decisions about them: this one comes inside the house, this one goes straight into the recycling bin. Which selling pieces survive the tired decision making of the mailbox-owners and avoid a trip to the recycling bin is usually determined by three primary elements: whether the mailbox owner knows and expects the company that sent the catalog and whether they consider the selling piece important to them at the moment they look at it. This could be triggered by a headline or an image. The third element is the mental state of the person while dealing with the mailbox-clearing task: If the person had a lousy day, or been fired, or is having a day where they’ve been contradicted by everyone they’ve talked to, or are simply tired of making decisions all day, chances are, regardless of the brilliance of the images and headlines available in the catalog, that the desire for simplifying life, for making the decision making process as simple as possible, leads the person to take one decision: unless it is a check, or an essential notification of some sort, or a personal letter, everything is going into the recycling bin. The eyes glaze. The headlines go unread. The beautiful images are unseen. Only the minimum engagement is needed to make that decision. Who sent it? Is it important? Is it personal? No? Then out it goes. There may be a bit of a thrill in rejecting all the calls to your attention embedded in the pile of physical mail. Buy. Read. Watch. Wear. Do. Not today. (Ha! Owned you!) Digital mailboxes don’t have the luxury of providing a catalog cover with multiple headlines to increase the chance of a single one grabbing the attention of the inbox holder. You only get one line. And perhaps you get to display your secondary text below it, if the inbox is set up that way. And while most people deal with their physical mailbox only once a day, dealing with an inbox is a constant task during the day and night, a task that is repeated, day after day, like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill until the end of time. This means that you are more likely to find yourself at the wrong end of the same impulse that a physical mailbox owner experiences when decision-exhaustion hits. In the trash bin. Or worse, in a fit of anger, labeled as Spam. Establishing a relationship cannot be done ‘top down’, with the business taking the ‘top’ and directing the customer to have an enforced relationship with them on the basis of consent to email. Establishing this type of relationship, on a remote basis, with email, requires consensus on both sides on the boundaries and benefits of it. As customers scan row after row in their inbox, day after day, their eyes glaze over the beautifully thought out subject lines, the emojis crying for attention, and they stop seeing you. They stop looking for you in their inbox. How can the customer see you in their inbox? How can you get them to seek you out there and smile when they see a message from you? By treating the recipient’s inbox real estate as a scarce, not infinite, resource. This isn’t simply a matter of cadence of messages. There are times, as when a purchase has happened, where a customer is happy to receive progress reports of the purchase completion and delivery. The messages received are understood to be like passing road signs that don’t require additional attention or action, but that by appearing in the inbox, help transform a remote purchase into something real. The problem appears after the first purchase, or the first newsletter signup. Most email marketers assume that because there’s been consent to receive email, there is a relationship there, and they gleefully start piling messages into the inbox like someone who can’t believe their luck that anyone would agree to pay attention to them and now that they have successfully ‘breached your defenses’ they are going to take advantage of that situation until told to stop. That’s how emails in the inbox get to be ignored, deleted and/or labeled spam. The assumption that consent to email is the establishment of a relationship between recipient and business is simply incorrect. The relationship still has to be built. Step by step. And it is up to your email marketing to do it. How do you build that relationship? It is a combination of the number of messages and the approach the messages take. It is possible to test the cadence of messaging using tools to establish how a delivery schedule can be optimized beyond the basics. That is relatively straightforward. The tougher part is where no tools exist to assist you. The part where you as a business has to build and nurture a relationship with someone who may or may not want it. The first step, then, is to assume that you have no relationship with the customer, even though you have consent to email. The second step is to assume that consent to email really means consent to test whether a relationship between the two parties could exist. From that point of view, you have to create messages that aim to build that relationship and put it on a solid footing so both sides understand where they are in relation to each other. One way to do this is view your prospect or paying customer as another version of you. A more evolved version of you. One that you are curious about and want to learn more about simply because you feel that you still have to understand them. Use your email to greet them and talk to them as that more evolved version of you. The You that you would like to be. The Zulu greet each other with the word Sawubona. It literally means “I see you, you are important to me and I value you”. By thinking of your email recipient as a more evolved version of you, you can make your messages carry the Sawubona feeling that you see and value the recipient and that you want to learn about them and understand them better. Email messages provide the opportunity to demonstrate this state of affairs via text, copy, images and the description of your business actions. By exploring this situation from your side, you may find that the relationship has a good chance to exist and survive over time. And by using the concept of focusing your emails on a more advanced version of you that you want to learn about and understand, you may find yourself respecting their inbox and modulating the cadence of your messages to meet the shared mutual importance between the two members of the relationship. It may not always work. Not everyone wants to be close to you. But you improve your odds of success by treating the potential of a relationship as just that, instead of assuming that consent to email means you can fully deploy the tricks to trigger a sale. Two Questions to Build a Business-Relevant Context for Email Metrics
An integrated digital marketing strategy is certain to include an email component. Email is still one of the most effective ways to create or maintain a prominent place in the minds of your customers or subscribers. A question that is always top of mind for email marketers is how to make the email investment count toward the overall results that are expected from the digital marketing effort. As with most digital marketing tools, email gives you access to a wide array of metrics. The variety of numbers can become a burden. There is a temptation to create complex reports that aim to impress with a considerable number of metrics, charts, tables and timelines that claim to interpret and explain every aspect of an email campaign to whoever is paying for the report. The idea behind this post is to propose a business-friendly way to evaluate your email efforts so you understand their purpose and how email is helping you reach your goals. Metrics with a context One way to ensure that your email reports are clear and understandable as part of your marketing effort is to provide them with a solid, business-directed context. The numbers themselves do not provide a context that is business-friendly. They reflect only the activities within the email channel, not their meaning within a proper business-context. Weekly or daily numbers can be evaluated on their own against a benchmark: sometimes the open rate may up, or down, or the bounce rate may have moved in some direction one week, and then back down again. It is important to understand the mechanics of why these movements may be happening, but the answer to those questions does not provide a business context for the value of the email marketing effort. It focuses on the measurement of the activities in email channel delivery. Not its business contribution. We are trying to look beyond reporting email activities that are internalized departmental reports. We are trying to look for business-relevant meaning for email metrics. Building a business-relevant context for email channel metrics At its most basic level, email marketing is a two-way communication channel with a customer or potential customer. With that in mind, one can begin to evaluate the effectiveness of the email effort by establishing how well the channel is working as a communications tool. For example, within that context, the metrics need to answer one question: Is our message reaching customers? The answer, yes or no, needs to be supported by the reporting and the benchmarking within the account. This is the difference between reporting on activities within the channel as if they mattered on their own, and establishing a useful, business-relevant context for the email channel. One question is not enough The answer to the question, is our message reaching customers? Encapsulates the business needs, the reason to use email, and the method for evaluating its success. But one question, though powerful, isn’t enough to create the context needed. Since we are trying to establish the effectiveness of the email channel as a communication tool between existing and potential customers, another question needs to be added:
This second question establishes the necessary understanding for the business-context events that email is generating. If your report says that most customers are ignoring emails by not opening them, then that requires specific actions to resolve. If the report says that most customers are looking at the messaging and doing nothing with it, then that points to a different area of improvement. The power of business-context metrics The answers to these two questions establishes the usefulness of the email channel as a communication tool within a business-friendly context. Naturally, to support the answers to the questions you have to have a well-connected metrics system that can deliver the kinds of relevant numbers that can be used to build answers to these questions and supports items like segmentation, data transfers, Google Analytics tracking, etc. Most email systems like MailChimp, Klaviyo, Aweber and SendInBlue, to name a few, provide the activity numbers that can be used to support the answers to these questions. Following this approach puts a common floor under email efforts and provides a simple way to evaluate, on their own, whether each activity within the channel has a good chance to succeed or not beyond what the activities numbers may say. The numbers are no longer talking email-speak. They are now talking business-speak, and by doing so, can effectively communicate their results to other groups in the business that will appreciate the effort and provide insight that can help, in the end, improve the way to make email count. |
AuthorDaniel Loebl is an experienced Marketer focused on expanding the recognition of customer value inside a business and keeps a 'beginner's' mind approach to business problems. Archives
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Naian International is a digital marketing agency specializing in email and SMS marketing for ecommerce, services, outreach, and communication. Our methodology begins by understanding your business, then and applying Digital Metrics and Dashboard analysis to create and implement an email marketing strategy that expands your reach, targets new audiences, and helps your business grow profitably.
Copyright 2023 by Naian International, all rights reserved
Copyright 2023 by Naian International, all rights reserved