------------------------------------------------------------ Mining eMail Gold By Jeffrey Jordan, Copyright 2002 ------------------------------------------------------------Ther's gold in them thar hills... or more likely, in
good graces of your prospects and customers.
We are out of dog days of summer and holiday season is quickly approaching. Now is time to make sure that you are maximizing impact of your sales/marketing process, specifically your communications with your opt-in email base of prospects and customers.
Your opt-in email can be a lot of things including your newsletter, order acknowledgements, customer service follow-ups and so on.
If we approach our customer's right, using one of our most power tools our opt-in email communications, we can significantly improve our sales.
The October 2002 Consumer Email Study by DoubleClick revealed some customer preferences that can help you improve your results.
First, getting your prospect/customer to open email can be no small task. No matter what you say in your email, if they never open it, it's a lost cause.
In study, 60% of respondents said that most important factor in opening their email was who email was from, while 35% said subject line was most important. So treat your opt-in base like gold and you have addressed 60%.
Remember, every message that you send to your list will be evaluated by your customers and THEY will make decision if your email will be worthy of a look in future. If you have blown their trust in past they may never open what you send them or may permanently route you to trash folder.
Still subject line is most important to a significant portion of email users. Some interesting gender based results came out of study.
Compelling Information/News 69% Male 46% Female
Discount offer 50% Male 64% Female
New Product Announcement 37% Male 39% Female
Free Shipping 28% Male 43% Female
If you are selling primarily to one gender you can make a significant difference in open rates by using a subject line theme which will get a larger response from that group such as discounts for female and compelling news for males. Perhaps you combine a discount with compelling news in subject line. When you think about it, getting a 64-69% open rate is pretty significant considering busy world in which we live.
