Grant James

Believe it or not, writing intriguing Email Subject Lines is incredibly important and can make or break your online marketing efforts.

My goal in this article is to be as objective as possible in defining and identifying characteristics and strategies of writing strong Email Subject Lines that you can easily digest and apply to your small business.

I have identified at least 5 Keys to Writing Email Subject Lines, that if you apply, will greatly help you on your way to online sales and success.

Key #1: It’s All About “# Opened”

People in the internet marketing community often talk about “Open Rates“. Simply put, your Open Rate tells you what percentage of people who were sent emails actually opened them.

After perusing through literally close to 1,000 Infusionsoft accounts for various companies, it is my personal opinion that you should shoot for an open rate of 20% or higher. Anything over 30% is great and over 40% is absolutely excellent.

But, THE SINGLE METRIC that I have found that matters much more than Open Rates is the actual “# of Opened” emails for a given email broadcast.

Luckily, for those of us using the powerful Infusionsoft Email Marketing 2.0 platform, there is a really cool, yet obscure report that you can add to your Home Page that will serve as a guide to help you learn from your highest performing emails and Email Subject Lines.

Check this out. It’s a screen shot of my Top 10 Highest Converting Emails, which I keep on my Home Page dashboard all times:

*To create this report, login to Infusionsoft and go to Reports > View All Reports > Email Broadcast Conversion Report. Set the “Date Sent” start date to 01-01-2000 and the end date to 01-01-2020 (this will pull in all of the emails for the past and future). Click “# Opened”, so that it sorts descending by the number of opens. Then, hit “Save”. Name the report “Highest Converting Emails”. Go to the Home Page and click “Add stuff to your homepage…”. Click “Add” next to “Saved Search or Saved Report”. Click the radio button next to “Saved Report”. Select “Marketing” from the first drop down menu. Select “Highest Converting Emails” from the second drop down menu. Hit “Save”.

What’s unique about this report is that you can quickly and easily see which of your emails were most affective and identify Email Subject Lines that your audience liked and connected with.

Since I started tracking and following this report this month (April 2011), I have been able to get 5 of my emails in my top 10 list of Highest Converting Emails, which is awesome.

In fact, I got the idea for 2 of my best Email Subject Lines this month based off of an email that was in my top 10 list prior to this month called “Your FREE Membership is Ready!“.

I saw that this email (which is no longer in my top 10) had 539 # Opened, and decided to send out 2 emails, which are now my #1 and #2 Highest Converting Emails. You can see them on the list in the image above and are called “FREE WordPress Plugin” (which had 731 # Opened) and “Download FREE Version of Infusionsoft Tracker” (with 681 # Opened).

Now that I have a metric to follow, each time I send out an email, I try to beat my #1 email in my Highest Converting Email report.

To be honest, this single report has changed my entire perspective on Email Lists. I used to think that it was all about “Email List Size” and “Open Rates”. However, what really matters is the # Opened statistic.

When you are trying to work with potential partners and affiliates, might I suggest taking a look at their statistics and seeing how many people are actually opening their emails.

Another great thing about thinking about writing quality emails this way is that it helps you push the limits and focus on:

1. Building a Bigger Email List

2. Increasing Email Deliverability

3. Writing Better Emails and Email Subject Lines

The reason for this is that each of these 3 things will increase the # Opened, thus beating your previous best emails. You can get there by increasing this size of your email list, making sure you’re not doing things that decrease deliverability, and getting in the mind of your audience so that they are looking forward to your emails.

Key #2: Become an Author

 

It’s funny because when I was in High School, I was editor of my High School Newspaper and loved the feeling of publishing a solid article for my entire school to read. During my first year on the newspaper staff, I got hammered by my teacher (who happened to be a former big-shot newspaper writer), for all sorts of ticky-tack mistakes.

My teacher would harp on me about keeping my paragraphs to 3 sentences or less, writing article titles that were captivating and got people’s attention, choosing stories people actually cared about, supplement your articles with pictures that “pull people through” your copy, and making sure my information was factual and accurate.

Looking back, I never would have thought that I would apply any of the principles that he taught.

But, there is absolutely no substitute for solid writing abilities.

Having said that, you have to start somewhere, and the online world doesn’t really care much about grammar, spelling, punctuation, or other writing semantics.

What does matter, however, is that you are candid with your audience, you reveal yourself and your personality in your writing, you write from your perspective as a person and not as a company, you have solid information that people like to read, and that you continue to educate and push limits as a thought leader in your field.

Those things do matter.

Repeat out loud, “I AM AN AUTHOR AND A PUBLISHER“. Say it enough, and publish enough, and you will actually become a great author and publisher.

Key #3: Become a Speaker

 

What???

I thought we were talking about internet marketing and Writing Email Subject Lines.

Well, yes and no.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they first start doing email marketing or using Infusionsoft is that they are overly anxious to create an Automated Follow-Up Sequence with anywhere from 5 to 52+ emails.

Most of the emails have terrible subject lines, worse copy, and are thrown together in a way that you are more likely to create a persona for yourself that nobody cares about than to actually get a new customer or more important, a strong following.

Here’s a novel idea. What if all of your emails were short, simple, and actually interesting to people?

Wow.

You can’t fake the fundamentals. Your stuff actually has to be good and people have to actually care about you and what you’re saying.

Even more importantly, what if you gave people an opportunity to connect with you on a more personal level than a few emails here and there.

Ah hah. Now we have something.

To understand the importance of writing Email Subject Lines and Email Copy, we need to look a little further down the rainbow to where the pot of gold lies.

Where da money at, yo??

The money is in moving beyond simple reminders (emails, texts, voice broadcasts) and providing opportunities for people to connect with you on a more personable level.

I will be writing more on this in the future, but here is my “Internet Marketing Pyramid“, illustrating where the money really is in online marketing.

1. Offline Live Events: 1-3 Days (Most Affective for Sales)

2. Online Live Events: 2-4 Hours

3. Fake Live Webinars: 1-2 Hours

4. Sales Videos: 5-15 Minutes

5. Online Articles: 2-6 Minutes

6. Email Broadcasts: 1-10 Seconds (Least Affective for Sales)

Ten years ago, you might have been able to send out an email and sell $30,000+ worth of products or services in a single day. While I have been able to accomplish this occasionally with Media Buys ($60,000 in 1 email is my highest), as I’ve worked with hundreds if not thousands of online marketers, this is an extremely difficult technique to duplicate.

A model that is much easier to replicate and sustain is to continually build up an email list that really cares about what you are doing and then start hosting various events.

It might sound crazy, but by hosting Offline Events (like where lots of people fly out to see you), Online Events (Instant Presenter, etc.), Fake Live Webinars (Pre-Recorded, but everyone thinks is live), and even Sales Videos (On a Squeeze Page with a Buy Now button), people will care more about what you are doing, open your emails more often, and buy more from you.

If you want for people to open your emails, you must build stronger relationships with your audiences. I’m sorry but this day in age 1-10 second worth of a person’s time on an email or an Online Article that a person reads for 2-6 minutes just ain’t gunna cut it.

You need their undivided attention and time spent face to face.

All of this comes down to becoming a speaker.

The best and biggest online marketers and business personalities end up becoming both authors and speakers.

People open emails from people that they know and like.

To become known and liked, you have to work backwards.

By working backwards and understanding where it all goes down the road, you will realize that you must become both an author and a speakers.

You need to be an author to keep in front of your audience.

You need to be a speaker in order to sell your goods and services.

The audience comes with the writing and becoming an author.

The money comes with the speaking and presenting what solutions you have to your audience.

Make sense?

And you thought we were just talking about subject lines! Well, we are, but with the end in mind.

Key #4: Get Ideas from Other People

One of the keys to coming up with great ideas for Email Subject Lines is to keep track of emails from other people that you opened, especially those from top internet marketers.

For instance, this last week Ultimate Marketer 2011 Finalist Sean Kelly from Healthy Vending emailed me and said that he was going to try to use the Subject Line “STUPIDEREST RESULTS (holy crap it worked!)“.

This was a subject line that Frank Kern used on April 22, 2011.

I usually try to run any of my wilder subject lines past close friends of mine to see what they think. I usually try to think of something that I think is funny, creative, or intriguing.

But sometimes, I have to be careful on my subject lines so that I don’t offend people.

For instance, following the tsunami and earthquake in Japan, I immediately thought about writing an email with the subject line “Tsunami Marketing Tactics“.

When I ran this past a couple of friends of mine, they shut it down, for good reason.

However, a few months ago, I wrote an email with the subject line of “Jungle Fever“, which is arguably a bit edgy but is still in my top 10 list of Highest Converting Emails.

I have also found that emails that do a mail merge using ~Contact.FirstName~ work well as do emails that end with punctuation such as “!” or “?”.

By watching what other top marketers use for subject lines, you can learn a ton and get great ideas for future Email Subject Lines.

Just make sure you bounce your crazy ideas off of a few people first to make sure that they don’t offend anyone. You don’t want to ostracize your audience, just entertain, educate, and reward them.

Key #5: Monitor Email List Growth

Many people don’t know this, but if you write a really good email, your Email List can actually grow quite a bit. Granted, email marketing is not exactly social media, but there are some principles that they have in common.

The first time that I was introduced to this idea was by Micah Mitchell. One day while we were hanging out, he pulled up a report in Infusionsoft called “Webform Activity Summary Report” which basically shows you how many unique people were added to your email list via each webform.

What I was not expecting was that there were all sorts of random web forms from various articles that I had published that my readers had passed along to others and thus helped me grow my email list. Totally unexpected.

So, what does Email List Growth have to do with writing good Email Subject Lines?

Well, quite a bit actually.

The bigger your audience (and I mean REAL FOLLOWERS) and the more you understand what they need help with and why they are listening to you in the first place, the better you will be able to help serve them and their needs.

I believe that by continuing to consistently grow your email list and messaging your audience better, you will actually begin to write better Email Subject Lines.

So, then, how do you track Email List Growth so that you can write better subject lines and increased that valuable metric “# Opened“?

Here are some reports that I look at that help me keep track of these statistics.

This report shown above is generated by Infusion Tracker and shows me how many leads I have generated each month. By keeping track of how many leads you are getting each month, you can set goals for Email List Growth and learn more about what factors cause your email list to grow and where you should focus your time and energy.

This report above takes it one step further and helps me understand what Leadsources are bringing me the most leads. This statistic is also made available to me from Infusion Tracker, but you have to upgrade to a version that includes reporting (not available currently on Casey Page’s InfusionTracker.com website).

Here’s the link if you want to sign up for this extended reporting service, which quite a few of us in the Infusionsoft community use for advanced reporting:

http://infusiontracker.com/advanced-reporting/

What this report helps me to understand about my own list building activities is that almost all of my followers and leads come from various events that I am involved with, both online and offline, because that is where my audiences reside.

When stats are nice and organized like this, it makes everything easier to understand and make wiser decisions.

Keep in mind that the whole point of trying to write great Email Subject Lines is to increase that 1 metric, “# Opened”. What this also means is that even if you struggle to write great Email Subject Lines, you can still improve your “# Opened” by growing your email list and building your relationship with your audience.

Recap

The most important thing you can do to write excellent Email Subject Lines is to track the “# Opened” for all of your emails. By focusing on increasing this single metric, you now have an objective way to measure which Email Subject Lines are best for you and your audience.

You are an author and a speaker. By connecting with your audience through written copy and by Live Face-To-Face Events (Online or Offline), people will get to know you better and trust you more.

Never market alone. Run your ideas for Email Subject Lines past people that you know and trust. Also, pay attention to what other top internet marketers are using for their subject lines, because they deal with this issue each and every time they send out an email to hundreds of thousands of people.

Monitor your Email List Growth like a hawk. That is your current and future business. You want more revenue, get more leads. Infusionsoft reporting doesn’t have all of the answers for you, but there are some really slick reports you can run through Infusion Tracker, plus if the report doesn’t exist, you can get it built by Casey Page and his team at Infusion Tracker. Slick stuff.

Make sure to send me a pic of your top 10 Highest Converting Emails so we can all collaborate and move the chains forward as a group.