A quick tip to boost your email open rate

Do you personalize your email marketing?

There’s not much point sending email if no one will read it.

Just like the envelope in a traditional direct mail package, or the headline in a print ad, the key to getting your audience to open your email and at least consider reading it is the subject line, and one of the most important things you can do with the subject line is personalize it.

It’s no different from direct mail, and I don’t think there’s a printer in business anywhere who doesn’t understand the power of personalization and VDP for direct mail.

That’s why I am always surprised to see emails from printers with subject lines that are not personalized — even emails sent by members of The Printer’s Marketing System using the [EM] Email Marketing Application, which makes it so easy to do.

This tells me I should be doing a better job of explaining the “how tos” — even the simple ones — so here’s a simple tip that will help you get your emails opened — the most important move of the entire game.

Just set up your subject lines like this:

%%First_Name%%, rest of subject line here

The %% at the start and end of the tag is the flag the [EM] Email Marketing Application looks for to swap in a value from the database. The “First_Name” part is the name of the custom field in the database where the first name is stored. Your custom field for the contact’s first name may be worded/capitalized/spaced differently, so do double check it.

If you use a different email marketing application the tags will be formatted differently. For example, in Constant Contact the tag will look like this:

<Property name=”Subscriber.FIRSTNAME”/>

In the [EM] Email Marketing Application you can also use the “Insert Dynamic Tag” button (located below the editing pane of both html and text versions of your email), and the menu of custom fields it brings up, to insert the correct tag.

Bonus hint:

Don’t forget to send yourself a test email to make sure all the personalization fields are filled correctly, and click all the links to make sure they are in place and correct.