Dear Email Subscriber: Remember Me?

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Marc Kline

Sometimes we have to wonder what causes a subscriber to delete our messages instead of reading them. Maybe they don’t connect with the reader’s interests. Or, maybe they’ve gone with a competitor and just haven’t unsubscribed yet.

There are several reasons we can guess at, but few are more troublesome than the idea of the subscriber simply not recognizing the sender or the fact that they’d requested information in the first place.

It’s frustrating, and it seems to happen all to commonly. Fortunately, it’s easily preventable. Let’s take at easy-to-implement ways to ensure your subscribers remember you and their subscription to your campaigns.

Your Reply Address: An Unexpected Guest?

Door Peephole What are you looking for when you look out the peephole at someone ringing your doorbell? A familiar face? So are your subscribers as they scan through the subjects and senders of the messages they see when checking their email.

If your brand doesn’t register clearly in their minds, you are probably not welcome in their homes.

Make sure there is consistency between what they saw in one place (your website, where they signed up) and another (your email). Look at the reply address and the name you’ve set to appear in the from line of what your subscribers see.

If possible, use an address hosted at the same domain name as your website, and avoid using free addresses anyone can get their hands on.

On the Subject of Subjects

Along with the reply address and name, your subscribers first see the subject of your messages as they review their email. In fact, they’re probably scrolling through this column from top to bottom, so it may be the first thing they see.

For the best open rates, among other things, your subjects should be:

Compelling

Brief

Telling of the Message Content

But these traits are of no benefit to you if your subject is not recognized. Consider all of the SPAM messages you’ve received with subjects that were all of the above but still went right to the trash folder!

So Should Email Subjects Be Sticky?

There are competing thoughts on how best to achieve recognition while still presenting something subscribers feel engaged once they can identify the message.

One side says you should focus entirely on recognition and always include a date and time and some form of your brand like:

“[AWeber] November 2007 Email Marketing Newsletter”

The other claims that these types of subjects do nothing to connect emotionally with readers and are therefore not optimal. Regardless of your approach, between the reply address and the subject, something should consistently communicate your brand.

I’ll leave it up to the jury as to what style of subject to use. If you have an opinion on which style of subject you feel works better, please share it in the comments.

Long Lost Friends Get Lost in the Inbox

Rolodex Permission has a short shelf life, and so does relevancy and recognition. There are just so many reasons to keep in touch with your subscribers consistently and so many reasons not to abandon a campaign for too long.

If there is too long a period of time between messages, subscribers may unsubscribe as a result. In the worst case scenario, they might head straight for the “Mark as SPAM” button.

Once you’ve developed your campaign and have a feel for how regularly your subscribers want to hear from you and how frequently you are able to send messages, do your best to stick with it to avoid being forgotten.

Invisible Messages Are Hard to See

In the end, given that you cover these three bases, getting your messages recognized is not so difficult after all. If you’re providing quality content relevant to what they subscribers signed up for, success is not far from there. But of course your messages need to be seen first in order to be recognized!

For a brief overview of what you need to know to make sure your messages get to the inbox — where they belong — check out two of the resources we’ve made available on the deliverability of your messages:

Join us tomorrow for our Live Video Seminar: Reach the Inbox: Avoiding the SPAM Folder

Don’t forget to download our free email deliverability guide!

Tags: scheduling, subject line

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12 Responses

Scot McKay
November 6th, 2007 at 10:51 am

After a good bit of testing, we’ve decided on the convention of bracketing our core brand with a very brief identifier of the particular list the subscriber is on. Then the unique subject line follows. The exception is that our core list’s main newsletter is marked with our core brand only for easy ID as a "flagship" broadcast message.

This is especially useful since we have users who are subscribed to several of our lists. Were we to simply brand all of the outgoing messages similarly (or not at all), users may think we’re e-mailing them too much.

Examples

Our weekly newsletter may have the following appear in the subject line:

[X&Y] Hide The Axes And Chainsaws

…whereas the subject of a message delivering premium content to paid subscriber may read:

[X&Y PS] Your November Power Session For Men Is Available

Note that the teaser works better for the general list, and the more objective flag works better for premium content that is expected by customers to arrive at a certain time.

We have very, very little confusion on this system. It appears to be effective at accomplishing the goal.
Arindam
November 6th, 2007 at 1:30 pm

Very good points Scot. However, I don’t use the brackets because it makes the subject lines longer, and most email clients wrap the subject lines, making it impossible for the subscriber to see the whole thing, which in effect reduces the open rates.

Even though I don’t use brackets, I have an average CTR and open rate of 30-46%. Of course my list is not too large, and a while ago, I had learned at this blog that the smaller the list, the better the response rate.

Additioanlly, here is what I do:

1. I have branded all my domains with the word ‘nuttie’ (except the central one; because it was registered at a time when I didn’t know about branding :))

2. The "FROM" contains my first name and the reply-to address is from my central domain verge-soft.com; this is the same for all my lists. Additionally, my reply-to address is a valid one to which people can reply, if required.

But I will try your suggestion on some of my lists; let’s see how it goes
Justin Premick
November 6th, 2007 at 3:34 pm

Scot & Arindam,

Great points and ideas from both of you. For our blog, we use a brackets in our subject lines, varying the content in them based on what type of article/post the email is for. Similar to what you’re doing, Scot.

Arindam, I’d be curious to see how your response rates might be affected by matching the "from" address domain for each of your campaigns to the domain where people sign up for that campaign. Have you done any testing on this?
Arindam
November 6th, 2007 at 3:51 pm

Haven’t done any testing on that, Justin. I am a believer in centralzation and verge-soft.com is kind of HQ for all my sites. I want people to remember only ONE domain and ONE ‘from email address’; so that they will still be able to access their stuff (be it a paid product or anything else) or contact me even if they forget everything else. All of my emails generate from a single email address and it helps people to recognzie that those are my emails. It also helps to keep myself sane as well; I need to login to only one email account to reply to all my subscribers’ queries. It is difficult for any average person to remember too many ‘from address emails’. Add to that the pain of whitelisting each and every ‘from email address’!

But I have added brackets to all my existing campaigns as per Scot’s advice. Let’s see how it goes. I think it would be a good move.

I am glad that all aweber emails generate from a single and valid address, and not multiple addresses. While your ‘from email address’ looks like a support address, mine takes the form of arindamATverge-soft.com.
Lisa Braithwaite
November 6th, 2007 at 11:04 pm

I just switched over to using the bracketed newsletter name followed by the title of my feature article for my subject line. My open rate before the switch was 61.7%, and after, 82%. Pretty exciting. Then the next month, back down to 55%!

I still think this is the best system for me, but I realize that now the title of the article (that shows up in the subject line) is more important than ever. That first article had a compelling title; the second one, not so much.

I used to use "Presentation Pointers, November 2007" as the style of subject line. Now that I’m actually trying to hook my subscribers with the subject line, I’m going to have to work a lot harder!
john cavenaugh
November 7th, 2007 at 1:06 am

I agree with the other responders…great points and ideas. I think we sometimes forget the basics on how to set up a successful blog.
Best homes
November 7th, 2007 at 2:14 am

Yeah, i am a subscriber of some really interesting to me web resources but i get also a good deal of spam and sometimes needed letters are just lost among them, i don’t notice them(
Justin Premick
November 7th, 2007 at 8:34 am

Lisa,

Very true - people have to want to open your emails, and compelling subject lines definitely factor into their decision to do so (or not).

Brian Clark at Copyblogger has a great series of posts talking about headlines. The principles & ideas there apply equally well to email subject lines, and are well worth reading.
Daniel McGonagle
November 7th, 2007 at 9:53 pm

Interesting post, I find myself reading these posts
more frequently because many of the issues here are
becoming more relevant as business picks up.

For instance, I got busy creating some membership sites
and I went over 2 weeks without emailing my lists.

I felt a compulsion to stay in touch with my lists but
was too focussed on new projects. And this is bad, when
your lists are one of your main sources of income.

Therefore this is an important topic because a lot of
people are getting overwhelmed with hundreds of emails
and its easy to forget who I am, and why they are on my
list in the first place.

Great job, and another good post.
Marc Kline
November 8th, 2007 at 10:20 am

Daniel,

As "business picks up" sometimes some of the finer details become more glaring and important than they did in the earlier stages.

Our advice to new email marketers is always to *get something going*, because it takes just a few thoughtful messages and a sign up form to start to see results.

Then, as we start to see some return, we can take a results driven approach. I’m glad you’re using these articles as a resource for guidance on a few things to work on.

Thanks for the kind feedback on the post.
Daniel McGonagle
November 8th, 2007 at 11:16 am

Marc, you’re welcome, and who better to learn email marketing form than Aweber, right?

Some posts I’d like to see information on, if you don’t mind suggestions.

A lot of marketers, myself included, are putting prefix abbreviations in front of each headline.

For instance, if you got on a list for Internet Marketing Tips,the prefix would read

[IMT] fname etc…

This is supposedly done to remind readers why they’re getting that particular email and who the sender is, and how they got on that list in the first place.

Does this actually make a difference?

Also, response rates are usually increased by always delivering valuable content, but even that doesn’t always do the trick.

Email deliverability can be increased by paying attention to SPAM Assassin scores, but those are merely the standard ways of getting your email delivered to a non-Spam or bulk folder.

I’d like to see some more information on how to use Aweber to poll or survey the readers to see what they really want and need.

Many survey scripts don’t really give me what I’m looking for and sometimes the scripts are complicated to set up.

So, any new information or features about conducting surveys would be much appreciated.
Marc Kline
November 8th, 2007 at 5:03 pm

Daniel,

We also use bracketed prefixes before our message headlines, and I agree that a well-designed experiment might yield some noteworthy results. I will definitely look into the possibilities there.

Really, each of your suggestions are well-noted and we’ll see what we can come up with for you. This blog is meant as a resource to the readers and not an AWeber sales pitch, so everyone, please keep the suggestions coming.

Just drop an email to blogideas@aweber.com whenever they come to you, and we’ll take a personal look and consider each of them.

Thanks so much.