Social media helps test email subject lines to improve open and click rates

If you are looking to improve the open and click-through rates of emails your roofing company sends to out, one idea to increase the likelihood of success is to use social media to test out potential subject lines.

Email subject lines are a major influence on whether or not someone even opens an email in the first place. They can either entice someone to click it or prompt them to delete it completely unread - or even worse, clicking the dreaded SPAM button (for more on preventing people from flagging your emails as SPAM, please see my blog post titled "Reduce Spam Reports of your Marketing Emails").

I recommend before you send out a mass email or newsletter, test potential subject lines with your connections on social media. Using a URL shortening service like bitly, Google or TinyURL, post multiple times in a close period of time to the exact same page but each time have a different description or "title" to the link, and have each one use its own unique shortened URL to the destination page so you can track in your analytics which one got you the most clicks.

For example, here are Tweets for one of my own recent blog posts:

• 5 specific things to do that will help you get new #roofing customers from your social media accounts: http://t.co/kLDg3dNQ
• How you can get new #roofing customers from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn: http://t.co/kLDg3dNQ
• 5 specific ways to get new #roofing customers from social media: http://t.co/4FSs68cN [blog post]

Each of these links go to the exact same blog post, but in my blog analytics tool I can see exactly how many clicks came from each unique subject line/link combination. The one that ultimately performs the best will be what I base an upcoming RoofPal eNews email campaign subject line and podcast title on.

For your experiment, the one that resonates most with your social media connections in terms of a significantly higher amount of click-through's is going to likely be your best candidate for your actual email campaign.

This strategy works particularly well on Twitter where people are used to seeing Tweets that lead them to click a link, but you can do the same thing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, or any other social media platforms you participate on.

If you decide to try this out, let me know how it goes for you. If you would like additional help planning this out or even executing it, please feel free to email Chris@RoofPal.com. Best of luck!