Re-send to people who don’t open. Create two subject lines, and alternative lead sentences. Send your email to your entire list on Day 1. Then, on Day 2, send the exact same email with the alternative subject line and lead to everybody who did not open your email. I’ve increased my open rates by as much as 50%!
If your subject line doesn’t hit the right note, the majority of your recipients won’t open your email. If they don’t open your email, they don’t take action.
It’s a ton of pressure and can easily give you writer’s block.
As a writer, I’ve worked hard on creating subject lines that get opened. And, in case, you don’t love writing subject lines as much as I do, I’ve compiled 6 tips for writing effective email subject lines.
Write your subject line as a …
Headlines should be provocative, interesting, pull readers in, and correlate with the rest of the story.
What day of the week do you dread? If you said Tuesday, you’re not alone.
Surveys show that Tuesdays bring with them the highest amount of professional and emotional stress.
It seems that weekend pleasure helps us coast through Monday, and reality sets in on Tuesday.
Even so, Tuesdays may be the best time to send eMails. Over 17% of all emails are sent on Tuesdays, making it the most popular day of the week to send. And, with an average open rate of 18%, they have the highest opens compared to all weekday sendings.
Saturday actually has a slightly higher overall open rate, but taking into account the amount of personal eMails sent on Saturdays and the low volume of overall sends, Tuesday remains the winner.
Does this mean you should do all your eMail marketing on Tuesday?
No. But you do have to determine the right time for yourself. Send times are one of the biggest things you HAVE to test to get right.
Try an A / B test. Send to half your list on Tuesday, and the other half on the day that you get the highest open rates. Then test a weekend sending.
Use your data to make the call.
Do you know why most professional copywriters always add P.S. to the bottom of their sales letters?
Historically (back in the day when letters were handwritten), the P.S. was used when writers remembered there was something they wanted to say, and didn’t want to re-write the entire letter.
Logically, we don’t need to worry about that anymore – if an edit is needed, the computer does it for us.
But advertising is not about logic. It’s about persuasion. And since people tend to glance at the end of a letter even before reading the body copy – the P.S. is seen as one of the most frequently read – and remembered – portions of any written sales message.
So What Should the P.S. Contain?
There are two basic approaches to writing copy for the P.S. – both of which are good:
And here are a couple of techniques you might want to try for even more punch.
