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!

Reduce Spam Reports of your Marketing Emails

What is the worst button in the world - the one button you don’t ever want your customers to press? The "Report Spam" button when they receive an email from you.

The moment anyone presses this button, it automatically begins to drastically affect your ability to deliver communications to all of your customers. Subscribers who press this button endanger your entire email marketing campaign and the whole list ongoing.

How do you prevent this behavior?
Make unsubscribing easy and obvious! This is deeply counterintuitive to most of us. It is even offensive to some; having worked so hard to build up their lists over time. They ask why they should make it easy for people to diminish the results of their efforts.

Here is the bottom line: someone who doesn’t want to receive emails from you for any reason will take the easiest way out of getting email from you going forward. If your unsubscribe option isn’t obvious, they’ll just flag you as spam and put your entire list in jeopardy. Make it easy and obvious to opt-out, and people will press the “report spam” button a lot less frequently.

Besides, offering a way to unsubscribe from an email list is the law. Making it easy to do this means that yes, you will lose a little bit of your list but you are guaranteed to retain the people who want to receive email from you and preserve the quality of your reputation.

If you continue to provide value in your email communications, you’ll be able to make unsubscribing easy without significantly reducing the size of your list, and you’ll keep your subscribers away from touching "the worst button in the world".

If you have any questions about this topic or would like to discuss it further, feel free to email me at Chris@RoofPal.com.