Author: Carolyn Nye / Source: Practical Ecommerce
Consumers are inundated with marketing emails. The challenge for ecommerce merchants is to craft subject lines and body content that are relevant to recipients, who typically scan their inboxes to identify messages that appeal.
In this post, I’ll review five tips to make a good marketing email a great one.
5 Tips for a Great Email
1. Subject line. Recently, my cat broke a bedside lamp. For a replacement, rather than visiting a HomeGoods or Walmart store I went to Wayfair.com. After narrowing down the selection, I left the site without placing an order or putting anything in my cart.
The next day I received in my inbox an email from Wayfair. It caught my attention. It read, simply:
We found these lamps for you.
The Wayfair subject line was one of the most effective I’ve seen. It immediately addressed my need, and it also helped me. Perhaps the email identified lamps that I wasn’t considering. Adding the smiley emoji provided a personal touch — as if my friends or relatives were sending this email.
All of these elements combined prompted me to open the email. It stood out in the clutter of my inbox.
The challenge with creating personalized subject lines based on products or categories is that they cannot easily be dynamically inserted to make sense. Consider, for example:
We know you’ll love these [products].
If the product were “wall art” versus “chairs,” the subject line would not work grammatically. Thus it is important to preview all combinations of dynamic insertions.
2. Product selection. When I opened the Wayfair email, I expected to find a good selection of lamps. But that’s not what happened. The body of the email did offer a few links to lamps. But it contained other product categories that did not interest me.
The right side featured recliners and sheds. The left side included a few links to lamps. The…
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