If you manage an email marketing program long enough, you’re bound to make a mistake at some point. As Forrest Gump would say, “It happens.”
Recently, I received email from two different senders, each of whom made a mistake that forced them to follow-up with a second email not long after. The two different approaches they took showed the value of having a strategy in place for such situations.
The first email was from Barnes & Noble, one of the few marketing emails I look forward to receiving. However, when I opened the message all I saw was what appeared to be a jumbled, text-only version of the message contained within one solid block of text (complete with 60-character tracking URLs scattered throughout). I deleted the message and moved on, chalking it up to an honest mistake on the part of B&N. It happens.
Later, I received a second communication from Barnes & Noble, with the following subject line:
Correction: This Week — Coupons, Exclusive Twilight DVD Offer, Jonathan Kellerman, Walter Mosley, More
Here was the subject line from the original message:
This Week — Coupons, Exclusive Twilight DVD Offer, Jonathan Kellerman, Walter Mosley, More
There are a few reasons I like what Barnes & Noble did here. Using the same subject line as the original message—but adding “Correction” in front—made it clear to any recipients that hadn’t opened the original that this was not just a duplicate send. In addition, they used snippet text to insert an apology and explanation for the mistake in the previous message. In email clients like Gmail, this apology would have appeared right next to the subject line. I was using Hotmail, so the apology, which was called out in bright red letters, was the first thing I saw when I viewed the message in my preview pane. Below that, the day’s intended message appeared—error-free.
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Ask any email marketing professional and they will tell you deliverability is key to your email success. Your message has to make it to the inbox before your audience can read it. Once delivered however you need to have your message cut through the other noise in people’s inbox these days. How do you do that? For starters writing an effective subject will help to get your message noticed – and hopefully opened.
Here are a few tips for writing effective subject lines.
1. Keep It Simple. Don’t try and over engineer your subject line. Be sure and use 10 words or less (5 is better) and put the most important part of the message in front. Never use all caps and avoid any unnecessary punctuation.
2. Think relationship, not message. Remember you should be trying to build relationships with your readers. Each message you send should try and strengthen that relationship and reaffirm readers why they signed up in the first place. Each message should not be an isolated communication but instead should be somehow related to previous/future emails.
3. Focus on content instead of on “entity”. Let people know what they can expect by opening your message. If your content is truly relevant to your audience a descriptive subject line will improve your chances of being opened. Example: “How to boil an egg” is better than “January cooking news”
4. Have someone write the subject line that did not write the copy. Why? Sometimes the email’s author can be too close to the material. Have someone read the message and sum up the key points. Use this as your starting point and then craft the subject while thinking, “why is this important to my audience and how will they benefit”.
5. Test, test and test. All people are not the same so don’t treat your email audience as if they were. Different people will react to different messages. Use a few different subject lines for each campaign and see which perform the best. Begin to segment your audience based on the message types they commonly react to.
I wanted to share a quick tip I recently discovered while assisting a client. Their issue? When deploying an email to their list, the subject line truncated at an initial quote mark. The quoted item and several words after it were gone.
As it turns out, some email clients/servers apparently use the quote mark as a coding command and it could cut off the message at that point. Searching the internet, I found this to be a common issue with both email, and in some general cases, coding. The overall consensus was to avoid using quote marks, but then I found a great trick.
Instead of using quote marks, use double apostrophes. Visually, they look nearly identical in a subject line, and you’ll avoid any missing words or odd characters/symbols appearing. As with any subject line practice, you should always consider the impact and value of anything you do: are the quotes necessary for emphasis?; do they detract from the rest of the subject line?
Example-can you tell which uses quote marks and which apostrophes?
“Quote”
”Quote”
Other character considerations for subject lines:
Although HTML commands (such as “€" or "€") have been created for the Euro currency, it’s recommended that you use the official abbreviation “EUR” (or spell out “euros”) instead, as HTML commands won’t render in subject lines. In many cases the symbol also won’t display properly in the body of an email as it’s not universally accepted. (You can read more here)
Also be cautious when copy/pasting content from emails/Word documents, particularly those containing symbols/characters such as mdashes, quote marks, apostrophes, etc. The only guaranteed universal characters are those found right in front of you-on your keyboard. If you can see/type it-your reader can see/read it. However, some non-standard characters might render as odd characters.
By coincidence, I just received a marketing email with an odd-looking item within the subject line (see image below). It appears they were attempting to insert an em dash by copy/pasting from some source, and my email client is refusing to render it. In this case, a hyphen or double hyphen would have been more effective.
