In retail, the right approach to email marketing is critical to success — and to the bottom line. As we reported in a recent blog, some retailers rely on email marketing for up to 20% of their business. The key to driving long-term success with your email program is an ongoing commitment to testing, optimizing, and re-testing the emails you send out to make sure they’re delivering the most value to your readers – and to your business.
Judging an email by its subject line
No matter how compelling your sale, or how amazing the copy inside an email, it’s the subject line that will decide if an email gets opened — so why do so many of us wait until the last minute to write and optimize subject lines? You only have one or two seconds to capture the reader’s eye and interest, so it’s worth investing some time in writing and testing subject lines. If testing subject lines is something you do on an occasional basis, re-commit yourself to a steady testing program. Begin your program by taking a long look at your email performance over the last year. Assign someone on your staff — or at your agency — to identify key trends in open rates over the past year. They might look for key performance indicators (KPIs) such as:
• Open rates by campaign
• Open rates by keyword
• Open rates by season, day of week, or time of day
• Spikes and drops in open rates
• How punctuation, capitalization, or word count impacts open rates
By identifying existing trends, you can begin to shape your approach to A/B testing headlines. Mixing gut instinct with scienceLooking at the data from past email performance will provide you with inspiration. You know your customers, and you know what they react to – or do you? See if the data challenges your current approach at all, or if it supports what you’re doing.
Now find ways to test your hypotheses. As you begin testing, it’s good to have a long-term plan. Work with your staff or your agency on the goals that you’re trying to achieve long-term – do you want to build a bigger audience, drive more revenues?
Consider your goals and design testing that will help you get answers on how to get there. MarketingLand’s The ABC’s of A/B Testing, provides excellent advice on how to set up testing for subject lines. For example, test including the offer in the subject line versus teasing the offer, or a longer subject line versus a shorter subject lines. These specific tests will help you start to build an updated and more effective approach to your email subject lines.
Better writing
The MarketingLand article also notes that, if you change nothing else about your email program, solid, well-written headlines can improve your reach. It can be difficult to write effective subject lines, so pull from the resources you have at hand. Look at your data to see what tends to work well – what does your audience react to? Pull from successful past emails to begin working on formulas that you can test. These might look something like this:
No more than 15 characters + Action Verb + SALE
Noted marketing expert Neil Patel writes that subject line with 4 – 15 characters have a 59% open rate and a 31% click-through rate. This is worth testing on your audience.
To help focus writing efforts, Patel advocates a CURVE approach to email subject lines. This is a way to remember which elements to include in subject lines so that they have the best chance of encouraging an open:
C = curiosityU = urgencyR = relevancyV = valueE = emotion
By incorporating these ideas (at least one) into very brief subject lines, you’ll increase the likelihood that your email will be opened. It’s not easy, and you may decide that increasing open rates is important enough to your bottom line that you’ll want to hire a copy writer just for subject lines, or work with your agency to ensure highly optimized subject lines. But the effort is worth it, particularly if you have a lot of competition and a lot at stake.
Still stuck? Subject lines do have a way of imposing writer’s block. Sometimes it’s helpful to kick start your brain with a list like this one – 50 All Time Great Retail Subject Lines from Vertical Response.
Test, optimize, repeat
As your testing gets more refined, you’ll be able to pull more specialized data on what works when and with whom – this will help you with other aspects of your email campaigns such as segmenting and RFM testing. The one thing about email testing is – you’re never really finished. Just as you find a sweet spot with your audience, their tastes will change, or a new trend will come along that works even better.
