Those
first 2 to 3 lines of copy in your emails can be just as crucial as your
subject line.
If
you’re like most organizations, every penny of your marketing budget has to
show ROI these days. Chances are you and your “wordsmithing” team spends hours
agonizing over the length, tone and design of your email subject lines. And you
should. Numerous studies show subject
lines really do influence whether or not your email gets read. According to
Convince& Convert, 33 percent of
email recipients open email based on subject line alone and nearly 70 percent
report email as spam based solely on the subject line.
But,
don’t forget about the intro lines that follow your subject line. Doing so is
like revving your car’s engine in the driveway, but forgetting to disengage the
emergency brake. In other words, lots of wasted gas and energy just to be spinning
your wheels.
Okay. Your killer subject line got the reader’s attending. Now what?
Intro lines are those all-important two
or three lines of text that users see immediately after opening your email.
Intro lines are even more important for mobile users since subject lines are
typically cut off for mobile users. According to Incentivibe, which specializes
in shared giveaways for business, marketers should use the intro line to hammer
home the offer and the benefit in 65 to 85 words. That’s long enough to convey
your message and call to action, but not too long to lose your recipients’
interest.
Getting ‘inactives’ re-engaged
Like
most B2B marketers, you probably have tons of inactive subscribers on your
lists and keeping those folks on your list is certainly not helping your
deliverability stats. Some of you are probably trying to re-engage your
“inactives” from time to time, but sending a once-a-year “we want you back”
email does little good, according to digital marketing company, Silverpop.
Experts say that’s waiting way too long.
It’s better to identify your inactive subscribers and cull them out after a few
months of inactivity. But instead of deep-sixing them entirely, put them on a
separate “activation track” in which you try to engage them by sending
different types of content than you’d send your main list.
EXAMPLE: Ask your inactive subscribers to update their preferences in one email
and send a survey of white paper in the next. Also try to find out why they’re
inactive. Are there any patterns? See if your inactives fall into a particular
demographic group, geographic group or industry category. See if they tend to
come from one or two activation sources. Those are red flags that savvy B2B
marketers will remedy ASAP.
There’s no substitute for a snappy, relevant subject line, but no matter how
clever your marketing team is, if they don’t follow it up with a relevant intro
line, you’re like a baseball team that keeps getting runners in scoring
position, but can’t them home to home plate where it counts on the scoreboard.
With 82 percent of marketers planning to increase their investment in mobile
this year (Source: American Marketing
Association and Aquent poll of U.S. marketing professionals), can you
afford email copy that’s not optimized for your on-the-go clients and
prospects?
The Free Resources section of our
website has more on this topic.
Stay smart and don’t be an email tease. If you grabbed your audience with a
snappy subject line, make sure you deliver on what you promised. Doing so
consistently will earn you loyal followers and advocates for years to come. But
being an email tease will get you on the “opt out” list faster than you can say
CAN SPAM.
Conclusion
By the
way, if you think email is going the way of Kodak, Blockbuster Video and yellow
cabs, think again. You are 6 times more likely to get a click-through from an email
campaign than you are from a tweet (Source: Campaign Monitor) and email
is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter
(Source: McKinsey). Hmmmm.
TAGS: email intro lines, better email
engagement
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