Ackura Blog

The success of an email campaign can come down to something as small as the subject line. Why? Because many recipients use the email subject line to decide whether to open or delete an email. In addition to this, spam filters are set up to identify certain trigger words that are common in spam emails and stop them reaching the inbox. Having these trigger words in the subject line can mean your email might never get to its recipients.

In this blog we will cover 10 tips to help increase the effectiveness of your subject lines and your email campaigns on a whole.

1. Subject line length

People receive many emails a day and most of the time they don’t have time to read through each email and so rely in the subject line to decipher whether the email is of importance or interest to them. For this reason it is recommended to keep the subject line less the 50 characters (including spaces) so that the line doesn’t extended beyond the email client’s (Outlook, Hotmail, etc )viewing plane.

It is sometimes argued that having a long subject line reduces the number of opens but may increase the number of click through rates because the recipients know exactly what the email is about and by opening is interested rather than just curious.

2. Get the Key Information in early

As mentioned in point 1, the subject line should be kept short to help increase the chances of the recipient opening the email but also that having a long subject line is not always detrimental. Whether you chose to have a short or long subject line this rule applies to both.

With an email subject line you should always try and get the key point in early so that it attracts those recipients who skim the subject lines and email clients don’t have a set number of characters before it’s cut off. So it’s vital to main the key points at the beginning if the line before it is potentially cut off.

For example:

“Ten tips for improving your email marketing” can be re-arranged and shortened to “Email Marketing: Top 10 tips”

3. Provide an immediate benefit

If you include an immediate benefit or some sort of urgency tag in your subject line then the recipient feels the need to act quickly for the fear of miss out. This is of course dependant on the content of the email and sometimes a time scale or deadline would apply to it. Examples of this are:

• 10 best places to play golf this week
• Order now for Christmas day delivery
• 24 hours left before our sale closes

4. Be truthful

There is nothing people dislike more than someone they deam as untrustworthy. Don’t stretch the truth in the subject line or promise more than the email can deliver, or make grand claims that readers will find hard to comply with in order to get a special offer or benefit. Readers will distrust you (and reach for the report-spam button) if your subject line doesn’t reflect the email content and will most likely automatically delete future emails without a glance.

5. Think about the Spam Filters

It is a thin line between “Catchy” and “Spam” and trying to get this correct is one of the hardest parts of Email Marketing. There are certain words that trigger the Spam filters and if these are used to often in the subject and email body then the email will be automatically put in the Junk Mail. It is always best to run your emails through spam checkers before sending them out to your mailing lists.

6. Support the “From” Field

It is a common mistake to include the company name or organisation in the subject line in the belief that it will increase brand association and forget about the “From” section. If your company name appears in this field then it is unnecessary for it to also be included in the subject line.

7. Personalise

Personalise email subject lines based on users’ previous history of engagement with your emails. If you know what products or content preferences, interests, past purchases, Web visits or links they have clicked then you have an amazing insight into what works for them in email copy. Be careful when personalising on past purchases, however, because the purchase could have been a gift for someone else and might not relate to your reader’s real interests, but it can still provide a vital insight. Always make it easy for readers to find and update their data and email preferences, through an “Update my preferences” link. Avoid using the recipient’s name in the subject line unless you are sure your database is up to date. There is nothing worse then sending out emails with incorrect names in the subject lines.

8. Write the Subject Line early

It is common that the subject line is forgotten about and left till last when building an email but it should be one of the first parts of the email you should think about. As you plan a email marketing campaign, start thinking about what will go into the subject line. That will help you sharpen your campaign’s focus and may even change or tweak the offer or article focus.

9. Look back at previous Emails

The best analytics you have are from previous emails you have sent to be sure to always refer to what you have done previously when writing new subject lines. See which email subject lines delivered the action you wanted – the most conversions, the highest average sale per order, the highest click-through rate, etc.

10. Test, Test, Test.

Test continually to determine trends and styles that appear to work. Pre-test if you can. Add a day to your campaign-creation schedule to give you enough time to try out different email subject lines. Opinions and attitudes changes so don’t assume what works now will work 6 months later.
I repeat – Test, Test, Test

Writing subject lines are too important to ignore or to write at the last moment. Take your time, try out various possibilities, follow the advice of the experts, and you may see your open rates go up.

B2B email marketing services have been designed so that a central office can create and manage email marketing campaigns that its subsidiaries, branch offices or retail outlets can personalise, so that the overall message is communicated to their audience embracing both centralised brand and localised messages.

Two Tiered Marketing

To best describe B2B email marketing, let’s take as an example a car manufacturer with a nationwide network of dealerships:

For the brand there is a message and ethos that the central office (Parent) wants to protect and communicate through their marketing to branches (Child), but they also need to embrace local variations to messages depending on the location of each branch.

Using PromoSender, the Parent maintains brand control of main design whilst the Child adds localised messages to suit the local audience.

Eg. In the United States the messages used to sell a car in New York could be very different to the messages used in California. Ie. The Californian message maybe localised to emphasise the importance of fuel economy, whereas the NY message might focus more of driving style and comfort.

Email Marketing for Two Tiered Campaigns

A second key requirement is that “child” accounts maintain their own separate and secure opt-in / opt-out recipient databases.

A two tiered B2B email campaign is, therefore, the most cost effective method of marketing a brand that is looking to share a message with an audience that is not located in a single area: The Parent creates the main strategy and message that is then sent to its branches or resellers who then send on with localised messages to their individual mailing lists.

With B2B email marketing services such as PromoSender, the Parent creates promotions and is able to control the extent to which these promotions can be customised by the Child organisations before being sent to the customers, making it easy to centrally manage approved messages used by subsidiary users.

The diagram below shows how the PromoSender two tiered email marketing service is structured:

As with any marketing campaign, analytics is very important, and keeping informed of distributed email marketing campaigns run through Child organisations could be nigh on impossible without centralised analytics.

By having multiple branches or resellers all using a B2B email marketing service such as PromoSender, centralised reporting is a snap with each Child collecting and sharing their own analytics with their Parent organisation.

Ackura MessageSender is a powerful yet easy to use Email Marketing web tool. It allows people with a non-technical background, such as marketing and operational personnel the ability to manage successful email marketing campaigns.

Creating, editing and sending your emails is a breeze. MessageSender also has all the reporting tools you need to be able to monitor the success of your campaigns.

It's easy to edit the content of your email

One of the things that makes MessageSender special is the ease at which you can manage your recipient list based on response and use this information to tailor your future activity. This makes it easier for you to tailor your content to your audience based on their previous behaviour.

Now in its third incarnation, Ackura MessageSender is the result of 6 years of development. We are continually developing the tool and hope to bring you new modules allowing you increased functionality. The aim of this blog is two-fold: to inform MessageSender users of new and upcoming features as well as providing tips and helpful resources on how to ge the best possible results from your email marketing campaigns.

After all – having the right tool is only the first step to a successful email campaign. The rest is down to you and your strategy.

Welcome to the PromoSender blog. The purpose of this blog is to bring you news of new and upcoming features, and help you make the most out of your email marketing campaigns. But first I want to give you a bit of an insight into PromoSender, how we came to develop it and what sets it apart from all the other email tools out there.

There are two Ackura tools used for email marketing, MessageSender and PromoSender. Quite understandably the question that we hear most is “what’s the difference?”

MessageSender is everything you’d expect from an email marketing tool – powerful yet simple to use features that enable to user to create, edit, send and track HTML emails; manage recipient lists and see real time reports on their campaign.

With PromoSender you can have all the functionality offered by MessageSender, with the added ability to create accounts for subsidaries and resellers. PromoSender allows the parent organisations to create and manage child accounts and send them customizable promotions to aid their email marketing campaigns while maintaining brand consistency.

The parent can control the extent to which these promotions can be customised by the child organisations. You can also control how long these promotions are made available to child users and to which groups the promotions are made available.

This makes it easy to manage centrally approved messages and promotions to subsidiary users.

Each Child account has it’s own its own recipient database which is secure and inaccessible by any other participant organisation (including the Parent User).

A diagram showing the Structure of Parent and Child accounts in PromoSender (click for larger image)

As the Parent user, you will be able to track all Child user mailing activity (not including access to recipient data) to allow you to keep track of the number of emails sent by Child users, either for feedback or invoice purposes.

The child accounts may be used by the reseller or subsidiary in the same manner as any other Email marketing tool, they will be able to add their own templates in addition to the promotions provided to them from the parent user. They will be able to track responses and manage their recipient lists.

PromoSender was initially developed for a large nationwide wholesaler so they would be able to assist their resellers with email campaigns for specific product promotions. We reallised that this model will work for a range of business including Car Dealerships, Government Organisations, Franchises and more.