Sending emails to patients and prospective patients is a great way to grow your practice. The thing is, do you ever check the analytics for the emails you send?
Imagine your email campaign so successful that everyone receiving it actually opens the email and reads it. Even more of a dream is that all the readers follows your call-to-action. (making that appointment to see you and clamoring for your services).
Today, Joshua Nite of TopRank Marketing asks: What’s Your Open Rate? In asking this key question to analyze your emails, Joshua speaks about “how to write compelling intros for Mobile Email Marketing”. This is important since the majority of emails are now being read by a mobile device like smartphones as opposed to the desktop.
How many of your current marketing tactics are over five years old? Marketing is a fast-paced profession; even if you’re still using the same channels, odds are your strategy has changed. How about ten years old? Twenty? Thirty?
It’s surprising, then, that a marketing channel nearly forty years old is still one of the most relevant for digital marketing. Email marketing has been a steadily effective channel for decades, and advances in technology only make it easier to track, personalize, and optimize your campaigns.
Ever-increasing mobile device use has helped keep email marketing relevant, too. One study suggests 20-75% of your email opens will be on mobile. The younger your target audience, the more likely they are to use their phone as a primary email-reading device. Combine a self-selected audience with new ways to deliver the content they opted into, and it’s easy to see why email remains popular. How popular? A recent study from Salesforce found that email marketing has grown 83% in the last two years, across B2B and B2C.
However, the more valuable a marketing channel is, the more crowded it will become. More brands sending emails means more competition for your audience’s limited attention span.
Your email has to do more than provide value—it has to compel a click within a very limited character count. Here’s how to write subject lines and preview text that make your email more likely to get read.
Subject Lines – Every Character Counts
Counting up characters for email subject lines wouldn’t have made sense in a desktop-only world. There’s a virtual acre of screen real estate for your beautiful subject line to sprawl across. On mobile, though, there’s precious little space to make your case.
The exact character count varies by device, and whether it’s held in portrait or landscape mode. You could have as little as 33 characters – or about a quarter of a tweet.
You don’t have to completely limit your subject line to that short, of course. Just put your most persuasive language at the beginning. Which of the following truncated subject lines is more enticing?
- Happy 4th of July! Enjoy the weath…
- We miss you! Are you ready to get…
- Free shipping today only + disco…
Personally, I’m only clicking on the last one. Even if only to find out if it’s “discounts” or an actual disco.
Basically, skip the pleasantries, the cutesiness, and the bizarre assertion that your brand “misses” someone. You can include all that in your preview text (more on that later). Instead, get down to:
- The Offer: “50% off sock puppets this Friday!”
- The Mystery: “Why do CEOs hate sock puppets?”
- The Thought Provoker: “How do you feel about sock puppets?”
- The Joke: “Every sock can be a sock puppet.”
Keep it all about the reader, and you’re far more likely to get an open.
Preview Text – Undervalued Real Estate
A great deal of marketing emails start with “housekeeping” stuff – a standard header that doesn’t have much to do with the subject at hand. That means the preview text displayed on a mobile device won’t give the reader more reasons to read it.
For example:
“How do you feel about sock puppets? Download this message as a pdf. Check out our sock puppet YouTube Channel.”
Versus:
“How do you feel about sock puppets? Senator Kelly wants to outlaw sock puppets.”
If your email starts with “click here to view on the website,” “view plain text version,” or a set of hyperlinks to navigate your site, you’re missing an opportunity for engagement.
Generally, you have about 90 characters for your preview text. So make your first couple of sentence irresistible. If you’re personalizing your emails (and you should be), make sure the preview text will demonstrate that personalization.
Keep Them in the Know on the Go
It’s possible (though unlikely) that you have been sending marketing emails for forty years now. But you likely have a few years of experience. While email is more relevant than ever, it’s time for us to refresh our approach to grab the attention of mobile users. Keep your subject lines short and hyper-relevant, make your case in the preview text, and you can earn a tap on your message.
Just make sure that email leads to a mobile-optimized website, too.
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A good idea is to send the email to yourself first and check it out on your smartphone to see how it will appear to receivers. The format varies and may not look the same way as it does on a larger computer.
Headlines
The subject line or headline is the most important part of your email and should command more attention than all the other parts of your constructed email. If the subject line is not relevant or engaging to the reader, it will be deleted before your message is ever read.
Next Topic
What problems are you struggling with in getting your message out to your target audience? Let me know at Barbara@TheMedicalStrategist and it will be answered in a future blog post. Speak to you soon!
