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Screen Shot 2013-03-25 at 12.56.45 PMLet’s take a few minutes to talk about digital marketing within your agency. My first question is this: does your agency have the ability to digitally market to your clients or prospects? If not, your agency needs to look at getting the right provider in order to be able to have a system to digitally market.

 

Digital marketing has been around for years and to assume that within your agency doesn’t need to include it is a major mistake. Even though we get bombarded with emails on a daily basis, the importance of digital marketing is still present, as long as the content is relevant and useful. You certainly do not want to be put your client’s or prospect’s spam list.

 

Let’s take a few minutes to discuss seven simple ways to improve our email open rates.

1) The most important factor is your subject line- treat it like a headline.  Creating the subject line of your email that follows the similar rules of newspaper or blog post headlines will get your email opened. Your subject line should tell the reader what the article entails and what they’re about to read.

2) Absolutely no yelling— using all caps comes off as yelling in text. You don’t want your subject line to seem as though you’re yelling at your customer or prospective client.

3) Numbers work— You can see that many blogs and  emails are using numbers in their headlines. For example, we could call this article the’ 7 simple ways to improve your email open rate.’

4)  Choose your words carefully because some words just don’t fit.  A great example of this would be using the word ‘reminder’ in your header.  This word is often picked up as a spam so be sure you don’t sound like someone who is spamming. Another word to avoid is ‘percent off’ which is another word in most cases that’s picked up by spam. A great place to look up words that are easily caught as spam is a little cheat sheet that you can find that www.mailchimp.com.

5)  The ideal length— The general rule of thumb is that your subject line should be in or around 50 characters. That’s not to say 40 or 45 characters does not work or that 60 characters is a bad idea, but we recommend the 50 mark. A key factor that we should always remember is that in some cases we need to be aware that some email programs might cut characters off, so make sure to keep the most important words in your subject line at the beginning to avoid having any of your keywords left off.

6)   Tell stories— If you can approach your subject line as a story it’s usually a great way to get the curiosity of your reader. Your emails need to be emotional, and a great way to achieve this is through stories because they allow readers to put themselves in the situation.
7)  Make sure to test your subject line before sending off that email— Ensure that your subject line is not spam. In most digital marketing systems, there is a place where you can test that you have not accidentally put in words that are going to get you caught in the spam box