In Praise of E-mail

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The Subject Line of My Affection
OK, so several thousand people have agreed to receive your message. Now you have to get them to open it. And the key to that door is a killer subject line. Do not resort to hyperbole: it sounds like spam. DO NOT WRITE IN CAPITAL LETTERS: it looks like spam. Do not use exclamation points, dollar signs, or smiley faces: they smell like spam. Do not say something deceptive that's meant to disguise the commercial nature of your missive (lines like "In answer to your earlier question" and "Thanks for all your help"). That's the most common trick in the spammer's book. And it makes people hate you.

A good subject line shows recipients how to solve a problem ("Apply for new, lower interest rates"). A very good subject line shows them how to solve a problem cheaply ("$7.95 for a 45MB NT hosting plan"). And a great subject line does both those things and also manages to throw in a whiff of intrigue ("Win a $10,000-laptop spending spree"). Of course, you must do all this with as few ASCII characters as possible. Haiku classes may help.

Because subject lines are so short, every word counts. Ron Richards, president of Internet marketing specialist ResultsLab, actually lost sleep over a single word in a campaign for a major online publishing client. The word was past, and Richards had used it in a sentence that appeared both in the subject line of an E-mail campaign and on the client's Web site: "Readers' choice of 12 must-read articles from past issues."

Now the word past may seem pretty innocuous. But tossing and turning in his bed, Richards realized it was not quite right. To some people, past could imply old hat. So the next morning, Richards changed the sentence on the Web site to "Readers' choice of 12 must-read articles from recent issues." (The stories in question had all appeared in the previous six months, so there was nothing dishonest about the new wording.) After that tweak, page views of the articles increased 17%, a big deal for the publisher, whose site was supported by advertising. Unfortunately, there was nothing Richards could do about the E-mail messages, which had already gone out. Presumably, the substitution of recent for past would have produced a comparable increase in traffic to the site.

Once you've persuaded people to open your E-mail message, how do you get them to read it? Writing a great marketing E-mail missive isn't much different from writing a great marketing letter. And who knows more about letters than the good old U.S. Postal Service? USPS has devoted an entire Web site ( www.uspsdirectmail.com) to the subject, with excellent advice on what it calls "Beginning Your Creative." For example, the site advises marketers to answer eight questions right off the bat, including "What is the specific objective of this mailing?" and "What is the one most important benefit to my audience?" Directness and brevity are crucial in E-mail. Keep things short. Think Strunk and White.

I Know What You Did with My E-mail Last Summer
Another wonderful thing about E-mail campaigns is that you can evaluate the effectiveness of each element. That's because everything on the Internet is so beautifully measurable. Seed your missive with a unique link to your Web site and count the click-throughs. That demonstrates the overall success of the E-mail message. From there you can track how deeply respondents dug into your site and what they did there. That will demonstrate how qualified they are. Are the results not what you'd hoped? Tinker with the message. Adjust the subject line. Try a different list.

You can also do practice runs, in which you pit several versions of an E-mail pitch against one another to see which one works best, before you launch a larger mailing. It's not complicated. Send out 1,000 each of E-mail messages A, B, and C. The results might look like this:

E-mail C was the most frequently opened. B attracted the most site visitors. But A produced the most sales. When you send out your next block of 8,000 messages, shouldn't you choose the one that brings home the biggest slab of bacon? After all, when it comes to marketing, bacon -- not spam -- is the meat of choice.

Jim Sterne, president of Target Marketing, in Santa Barbara, Calif., is a speaker, consultant, and author of the books Email Marketing, World Wide Web Marketing, and Customer Service on the Internet (John Wiley & Sons).

Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

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