By Holland Cooke
Consultant
BLOCK ISLAND, RI — You DO regularly communicate with an email list…right? Few opportunities to engage are more powerful than the ongoing conversation you have with followers. It’s a relationship that Pandora and Spotify and SiriusXM can’t emulate and smart radio hosts exploit well.
Send a link to your latest episode, invite feedback, and (of course) “Share with a friend.”
Any email you send is worthless if it doesn’t get read
- And you yourself demonstrate why, every time you open your In Box. True or false: You delete some (lots) of messages unread, simply based on the Subject line?
- Something else you do: Open snail-mail over the wastebasket. I say “open” even though you don’t. Based on a glance at each envelope, you decide whether to bother. So…
Fuss over the Subject line
Tips, from Entrepreneur.com E-Mail Marketing Coach and Constant Contact CEO Gail F. Goodman:
- Keep it short and sweet. Keep Subject lines under 50 characters, including spaces. A study showed that subject lines with 49 or fewer characters had open rates 12.5 percent higher than those with 50 or more characters.
- Be specific. “The Green Thumb Newsletter: September 2020” doesn’t convey a benefit. Better: “The Green Thumb: When to Bring Outdoor Plants Inside for the Winter.”
- Write it last. When you’re done with the body of your email, read it over and pick the nugget that’ll entice your readers to learn more by opening your message.
- Take some time. Write several — at least three or four — before choosing which to use. Run them by a friend or colleague and see which they think is most compelling.
- Test it. Got two strong Subject lines? Split your list in half. After a few such tests, you’ll get a sense of what works for your list. And the better you know your audience, the more effectively you can communicate with them.
Best time to send email: between 8:00 am and noon (recipient’s time zone).
Per a Yahoo Labs data set of 16 billion emails.
Holland Cooke (HollandCooke.com) is author of the E-book “Multiply Your Podcast Subscribers, Without Buying Clicks,” available from Talkers books; and “Spot-On: Commercial Copy Points That Earned The Benjamins,” a FREE download here: and “Inflation Hacks: Save Those Benjamins.” HC is a consultant working at the intersection of broadcasting and the Internet. Follow him on Twitter @HollandCooke