"Salesy" Email Subject Lines Will Get You Free Admission To Your Prospects Spam Filter
A few years ago I was tapped to assist with the blogging effort at our organization and I feel I embraced the challenge with open arms. I soon found it to be a great way to collect my thoughts and share my opinion on the hot topics facing me and my team. It was important for me to feel that the content I was sharing was compelling enough for the folks subscribed to the blogosphere.
We soon began to pay close attention to viewership through our trusted partner HubSpot. They were able to provide us insight into my blog (and many others) that seemed to receive more views and comments than the others that we had been posting. What we soon came to realize was that the name of the title of the blog topic played a huge factor. The content could have been just as compelling as any other topic, but the better the title of the post the better the viewership.
When we're prospecting, the same concept can easily be applied to a subject line in the intro emails we're sending to our target accounts. The problem is that the average marketing team thinks they can apply the same subject line or messaging as they would within their social media/blog posts. Prospecting emails and social media messaging are not interchangeable. What we've discovered within our prospecting efforts is that simplicity is the key, whereas with social media we should be allowed to use a bit more creative license. In an email campaign, salesy subject lines will get you free admission to your prospect's spam filter, while the opposite is true for your social media campaigns and blog titles. Something as simple as "Referral Help" has a much better chance of getting opened than you may think. We did a little experimenting with our open rates recently and found that any time we has used "ROI" in the subject line as compared to "Referral", our open rates dropped by 25%.
Point is, leave the fluffy sales/marketing subject lines and content to your social media team. When prospecting, the message should be simple and to the point. Once you get em' hooked...then you can get salesy.
I came across this interesting blog from The Demand Gen report that highlights some of the key words that we should be focusing on and helps to proove what we've experienced to-date as well.
What compelling email subject lines have you seen increase open rates? More importantly what doesn't work?