You can’t sell anything unless you get your prospect to listen to you, and the best-written, most engaging email will be worthless if it is not opened by your prospects. Stan Dahl and Brian Johnson discuss how to get your prospects to open your emails.
Stan goes first:
You touched on something else that we’ve also tested a few times. People always ask us…the subject line. “What’s the magic subject line that will get your email opened? Again, there’s an art and there’s a science there, and what works for a period of time will tire quickly.
By far, the more important part of that email message is the “from”. The person it is from. The wittiest…spammers live on the subject line, getting you to open it. They don’t care who it’s from, they have remarkably low open rates. And that’s what they’re studying all the time.
We are going to get higher open rates, because we put “from John Carlton”, “from John Carlton’s office”, and that is far more important in the decision to open or not, and obviously we are trying to do something to make you click on this email of all the emails we send, but that is secondary.
And, we’ve played around with some stuff like that and very quickly we realized, like we didn’t want to put my name in the “from”. We tested it and it didn’t work, because no one knew who I was. Now, you folks, in this segmented list, we might try that, but even so, I’d probably “Stan Dahl, of John Carlton’s office”. And then the email would be from me. Now, Brian, you guys have tried that recently. You’ve been doing some broadening so it’s not Rich all the time. How did you warm that up? How’s it going?
It didn’t go well.
OK. There you go.
We had reasons for doing that, you know. The company’s growing, and we were trying to preserve the brand Rich Schefren, which is a very valuable brand, but the company is growing and it can’t all be Rich Schefren.
So, we had to start, then we got Jay Abraham, and a lot of other stuff, so we had to find ways, well, maybe some of the smaller products or some of the JV-type arrangements we do might come from “Marketing”, or from somebody else.
So we started to test that and do that, and we got some backlash. A lot of clients didn’t like that, they were like, well, “who’s this guy?” I’m here because of Rich, or I’m here because of Jay, and they felt like we were abusing them, which is a big no-no. As soon as your contacts feel that way, that’s a red flag and a problem. So we are actually starting to scale that back, and getting back to, you know, outstanding information that goes from Rich.
What it also has done, it’s made us more aware of getting back to our vision as a company. We shouldn’t be doing anything, or sending JV partners or anything else that doesn’t fall in line with who we are and what we are about in our brand. Which we did, a little bit. And that hurt us. So, it’s now forcing us to get back to, like I always said, to do the right thing. So, it’s not working too well for us now.
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Stan Dahl & The Marketing Rebel Team