Since email is now preferred by 70% of buyers who want to learn about new products or services, email marketing is an important feature in an Integrated Outsourced Sales and Marketing Campaigns and Sales Automation Engines.
Over the next couple of weeks, we will publish several articles to help companies just getting started with sales automation and email lead generation, to improve results. The articles will address:
- Why using a Whitelisted Service Provider Makes Sense
- How to Design and Code Your eMails
- What Offers to Make
To kick it off, we will start with the basics of subject line writing to avoid filters, or if you are marketing to small businesses or consumers, Google’s Promotion Box. If you are not familiar with what this is, we have attached a screenshot below (and avoiding this box will also be addressed in articles down the road).
What to Avoid in Subject Lines
- Don’t use spammy and some not so spammy words like “Free”, “Urgent”, “Call”, “Marketing”, “Now”, “Income”, “Sale”, “Discount”, “Month”, and “You’re”. As an outsourced sales and marketing company, we have identified “words to avoid” when running campaigns for our clients. You can download a PDF of these words to use for future reference (and we have also included an image). If you have a question about other words, you can also run it through spamassasin.com. This is a free online tool.
DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPS AND exclude MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! Not only is this obnoxious, but you’re more likely to end up being flagged by a spam filter.
Try and keep the first 40 characters of your subject lines as impactful as possible for visibility, not delivery.
- Don’t use symbols or strange characters – $$$, <>, ###, ??? and Emoji will hit the filter immediately.
- Finally don’t oversell in the subject line – The goal of your email campaign is to get the buyer to open and engage. Do not expect one open and buy. This is the first step in a process. You will get more opens and more conversions with education vs. selling.
Don’t worry about number of characters and try to keep subject lines impactful. Remember, email platform users may only see the first 40-50 characters, or even less, and your email subject lines are even more compressed on mobile devices. Despite all the information about subject line length, studies show that length doesn’t actually affect open rates. Below are two examples of how an email could look in Outlook and how much of the subject line a buyer could see on an iPhone.
Try and keep the first 40 characters of your subject lines as impactful as possible for visibility, not delivery.
- Don’t use symbols or strange characters – $$$, <>, ###, ??? and Emoji will hit the filter immediately.
- Finally don’t oversell in the subject line – The goal of your email campaign is to get the buyer to open and engage. Do not expect one open and buy. This is the first step in a process. You will get more opens and more conversions with education vs. selling.
How Gabriel Sales Can Help with Outsourced Sales
Gabriel Sales specializes in Outsourced Sales and Marketing Campaigns that helps buyers buy through integrated digital campaigns and sales automation engine implementation. We make all this easy and you can learn more about our point solutions following the links below.
