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email marketing

Email Marketing: 5 Ideas to make it personal

Friday, March 2nd, 2018

In email marketing, the subject line makes the first impression in their inbox. It’s your first chance to capture their attention and get your brand noticed, email opened and message read. So let’s make it personal.

Constant Contact recently introduced the ability to personalize the subject line. So what does that mean?

It means you can add the first name and other contact information directly in the subject line. For example instead of having a subject line that reads, “Here are 5 tips on Email Marketing.” You can personalize it to read, “John here are 5 tips on Email Marketing you can use today.

In order to do this, you will need to have the first name of your contacts in your Contacts List. Now is the time to start collecting more contact information with the idea leveraging it in your future marketing efforts.

The subject line can also be personalized with other contact information such as anniversary, birthday, city, state, job title and more.

Here are 5 ideas to make it personal:

  1. Use the contact’s first name in the subject line to spark the “conversation.” Everyone loves their own name, and seeing it in their inbox can lower the hesitation to open the email and start engaging. The example above, “John here are 5 tips on Email Marketing you can use today,” is one way it might be used.
  2. Make and “exclusive” offer for where they live. Imagine your business has a nation wide audience and you want to offer a special deal on your products or services across the country. Why not make it seem like an exclusive regional deal? Add the location of the email subscriber to the subject line, “Special offer for [City or State] residents…” They will see their City or State, in the subject line, which may make the offer / announcement seem more exclusive.
  3. Speak to their professional title. For a B2B (business to business) company, you could add a person’s title to the subject line. For example, “How a [CEO, Human Resource Specialist, Manager, or whatever the title, etc.] can become more productive with the Art of Promotion online training.” It can help the reader identify with the subject as it relates to their job.
  4. Have a Birthday Special. Say you have a universal message that you want to distribute to the majority of your list(s). Your email but could capture the reader’s attention by adding a birth month to the subject line. For example; the subject line could be “3 ways people born in [Month] can benefit from___“ Everyone could then see their personal birth month in the subject line.
  5. Combine the first name with another personal data point. For example, combine their name with their job title, “John, other [job title] have had good results with _____”.

The idea is to make the subject line stand out in a personal manner. It also means that the content that you are delivering needs to live up to your subject line. Don’t try to trick them or mislead them in the subject line especially if you are personalizing the subject line. The more you can personalize your marketing efforts the more chance people will respond to your campaigns favorably.

Get creative, get personal and get results!

Put them on your naughty, nice or other list and get better marketing results

Wednesday, December 21st, 2016

shoenaughtynicelistBuilding a quality email marketing list should be a goal for every business and non-profit. Yet many are reluctant to event try email marketing because “they don’t have a list.” If you have existing customers, donors, vendors, and volunteers – you have very powerful list that you need to leverage.

Your primary goal should be to reach out to your list at least once-per-month with a focused email marketing campaign. But what could you do to augment that once-per-month frequency without being seen as sending too much or over saturating your audience?

It’s time to think about segmentation. This means you need to drill down and understand not only your customers, prospects, fans, and super fans but you must also understand what your business provides and how those offerings are perceived by the various people on your master list.

You may want to segment based on location. If you have customers and audience across the country or around the world, you may want to consider segmenting based on time zone.  Timing is important in any marketing activity. You need to reach them when they are available. Los Angeles is having breakfast, while New York is thinking about lunch and Hawaii is sound asleep.  Sending your email when they are most likely to view it is crucial.

Your email marketing reports can help you determine how to segment. For example, say you sent an email to your entire list. It offered information on shoes. Specifically, you had a quick paragraph about red shoes and a quick paragraph about blue shoes. Each had a link to a more in depth article or perhaps a cart item on your web site. After you send the email, your Constant Contact report will show you who clicked on which link – red shoes or blue shoes. Those recorded actions could then be saved as separate lists, so now you could reach out to the red shoe lovers or the blue shoe lovers when you have a special promotion on that item.  Their behavior (clicking on the directed link) can be used as a segmentation strategy.

You could also promote separate sign up links based on interests. This allows your audience to start segmenting for you. Constant Contact allows for multiple sign up forms, which can be used as posts to social media, forms on your web site, text to join, special promotions and so on.  Giving people options can result in valuable segmented lists.

Segmentation is a powerful strategy. It helps you to better understand your audience and deliver relevant information to them.  It’s up to you to divide and conquer!