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Now that you have your email list and you’ve chosen an ESP, what makes for a good email? Understanding this means understanding all of an email’s working parts—and there are five major ones:
- Subject Line
- Opener
- Body/content
- Call-to-Action
- Post Script (PS)
Let’s have a look at each of them, shall we?
The Subject Line
Whether someone reads your email or not is extremely dependant on the subject line: before your readers can click through the awesome contents of your email, they need to open it. If you can’t get people to read your emails, your campaign are dead on arrival.
Fun Fact: According to Chadwick Martin Bailey, 64% of people decide to open an email based on the subject line alone.
A few points to remember about your subject line:
- Shorter Is Better. Subject lines with less than 15 characters have the best open rates (15.2%) while anything over 50 characters has the lowest open rates, according to MailerMailer.
- Personalize and/or Localize. Direct your email subject line to a specific person by using her first name or the pronoun you, and consider using facts you know about them (i.e., what they do and where they live) as part of the subject line. “Great Offer Inside!” or “Jane, We Have A Great Offer For LA Fashion Bloggers Inside”—which subject line do you think will get more people to click?
- Setting false expectations is a bad idea. Clearly state what’s inside the email, and never intentionally deceive the recipient. I’m sure you’ve opened an email in the past because of a clever or gimmicky subject line and got disappointed when the content didn’t deliver. Unsurprisingly, we deal with deception like this by delegating the offending email to the spam folder—the opposite of where you want to end up!
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The Opener
Congratulations, you got your recipient to click the email! That’s winning half the battle, but you still need to get your reader to the finish line—the end of the email. Once a person poens the email, it’s time to make sure they want to continue reading. This responsibility falls on the opener.
The opener functions as a brief summary of the contents of an email. In today’s world, we’re constantly bombarded with things to do and information to process, so your email recipient may read your email while doing at least a couple of other things. We have to mitigate this by telling her clearly what the email is about in 1-2 sentences.
If possible, be visually different! Creating a great opener pulls the reader’s eyes in. Our brains process visuals much more easily than plain words (and almost automatically, too). If you can communicate whatever it is you want your message to say using visuals—then definitely do that.
The Body/Content
After the email opener comes the actual email content. Your email marketing content usually depends on what kind of emails you send out, but no matter the content, there are a few email rules to remember:
- Be Useful and Ultra Specific. The best content always ask the question, “How does this email help the reader?” Identify the benefit and then state it as clearly and quickly as possible. If your email reader can’t identify the benefit, she will most likely delete your email.
- Identify Yourself. Make clear who writes the email, either by design and/or wording. Have your logo front and center at the start of the email, or make sure you state who the email is from.
- Create a Sense of Urgency. Get your audience so interested in your piece of news that they MUST take action now. Although almost all marketers know creating this urgency is crucial, the real challenge is doing it without annoying your target recipient.
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The Call-to-Action
Last but not least? The call-to-action. The goal of the call-to-action is simple: tell your reader exactly what you want her to do. Although there are many ways to go about this, the easiest way to ensure your call-to-action is effective (and NOT annoying) is to make it truly beneficial and worth the reader’s time. So choose appropriate, concise words and include your call-to-action in multiple, easy-to-spot places so it won’t be missed. Don’t forget to include it in the PS!
The Postscript (PS)
Speaking of, the postscript is a sentence or two added after the main body and your signature. This is another area where you can effectively place your call-to-action.
You can use the PS in many ways. Perhaps as bait, with the clickable link as a hook to stress the main selling point again from a different angle. You can also use it to create a sense of urgency, as a last effort to make your email personal, to introduce a bonus, or include a testimonial. It’s all up to what you deem important.
That’s that—the five parts of an email you should pay close attention to. Use these areas to grab your email subscriber’s attention and to get them into your marketing funnel.
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