Email is always a challenging marketing medium. It’s so tough to connect with your target audience without coming across as overly sales-oriented. It can feel very tempting to include your sales pitch in every space that you can, including the email subject.
How exactly does one walk that line between casual or personal and driving the reader toward taking a specific action?
How to Avoid Ruining Your Sales Pitch in Your Email Subject Line
In fact, many times the subject line alone can kill any chance you have of making a sale, or convince a target to reach out for more information. Using a subject line like “Checking in,” or “Following up” can sound casual to you, but at this point, everyone has been exposed to email marketing enough that they know it is really a push to get you to buy what they’re selling.
Taking a different approach
Ultimately, the use of email marketing as a means of directly driving sales is a dead practice. It no longer works the way it once did in the early years of using email for marketing purposes, in large part because people get turned off by overly direct sales pitches.
So what should you say and do instead with your marketing emails?
The best strategy today is to provide your reader with something useful or educational, rather than reminding them that you want to sell them something. Once you have a prospect’s email address, you can assign them to a certain list based on their interests and demographics, rather than using one large email list for all of your prospects.
Once you have done this, you can focus on delivering them digital assets via email that they will actually open and care about, thus enhancing the relationship between you and your prospect.
What type of offerings can you provide via email?
Anything that is relevant to your business and that your targets would find useful. For law firms, providing white papers or “ultimate guides” to specific legal issues is a great way to go. You might also consider putting together an eBook for a certain practice area.
Revising your subject lines
Determine the kind of digital offering or asset you will send along with your marketing emails. Then you can rethink the way you compose your subject lines so your prospects won’t automatically delete your messages, send them to the spam folder, or unsubscribe.
The subject line should indicate that there is something of use to them included in the email.
For simplicity’s sake, think of your email subject lines in the same way you think of your blog titles. Tell your reader exactly what you are giving them in a watch that catches their attention.
If you have put together a guide for what personal injury clients should do after a car accident, simply title the email “Five Steps to Take After a Car Accident,” and include the content you developed specifically for them.
Email marketing messages do not have to be a nuisance to your subscribers. Provide them with something interesting and useful. They will actually look forward to getting your messages, and be more interested in working with you in the future! Forget the sales pitch.
Conroy Creative Counsel offers services in website design, content marketing, and digital strategy. You can learn more here.
