If only people who are interested in your product or service would buy it the first time you offered it to them. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case. More often than not, you have to "touch" them with your marketing outreach anywhere from 5 to 10 times (or more) before they finally make a purchase decision.
The problem is, you’re not the only one who is eager to make them a customer. In a December blog post, HubSpot quoted a statistic from The Radicati Group (a technology market research firm) that professionals receive an average of 88 business-related emails a day. So, it’s not surprising that yours are frequently met with a stony silence—which in digital terms means they go unopened or are trashed without a glance.
Enticing Overtures
When your conversation with a prospect has stalled and needs a restart, one of the best ways to accomplish that is with a creative email subject line. HubSpot listed 16 of them in their post. Here are five of my favorites and why I like them.
- "?" Whether they find it intriguing or irritating, many people are going to open the email just to figure out what the heck it is you want. And if their action was prompted by irritation, that’s OK. If they find something interesting inside, they’ll surely forgive you.
- "Am I off base?" What’s implied here is, "If so, I’ll stop bothering you." Consequently, I can see people opening this email to make that evaluation just so they can, if appropriate, send you packing.
- "Closing the loop." Even if your product or service isn’t something they have a pressing need for, nobody likes to see the loop closed.
- "Are you seeing someone else?" Making light of what is possibly the end of the road for you and a particular prospect shows both that you are a realist and that you have a sense of humor.
- "Only [x] weeks left to achieve [goal]" We’ve blogged before about using urgency in marketing. It’s a powerful tactic and one that is likely to increase your email open rate.
Write Your Own Ticket
These are just a few clever ideas. The creative folks on your staff (or mine) can surely come up with dozens. The point is, another business-like and boring subject line is not going to get a previously unmoved prospect to take action and open the email. If you think outside the box a bit, however, you may be surprised at how many cold leads become hot prospects.
As Colorado Springs’ leading content marketing firm, it's been our pleasure to turn up the heat on email campaigns and other strategies for our amazing clients. Please give us a call and we’ll get some conversations started for you.
