Email marketing to your list is essential but it’s a bit like walking a tightrope with no safety net.

When you get it right, it seems like all your wishes have been met,

When you get it wrong, that’s a different story.

Whilst you can’t please everyone, there are some things you can do to tip the odds in your favour.

The biggest issue is that – even with all the spam – we still take email as a personal communication.

Back when your letter box was full of post people complained about “junk” mail. And most mail order operators were ecstatic if they got a 1% response rate to their mailings – that kind of response made them very nicely profitable.

But at least people could sort their post into piles and deal with it at a glance.

Emails don’t have the luxury of that.

There’s no return address or decorated envelope or anything else to differentiate them.

Just a “from” name and email address and a subject line.

Most email programs offer a filtering system but it’s quite rudimentary.

It hasn’t really changed since the first email program I used back in 1995.

You can filter emails into different folders – but that’s awkward if you have too many folders as you run the risk of inadvertently missing one.

And you can maybe sort them – the email program I use allows me to sort by date, subject or sender.

The main email filing system is next to useless – it’s a bit like the pile of pieces of paper in the corner of your office or home that you’re going to sort through one day but never do.

Direct mail at least had the advantage of being binned.

Spam emails get deleted.

But most of the rest are just marked as read in case you ever need to go back to them.

So your emails have to somehow stand out from all that.

And you need to be able to cope with the Jekyll and Hyde personality switch that disgruntled subscribers move into.

There seems to be a rule that common courtesy doesn’t extend to everyone’s email responses.

If you run a list of any size, you’ll hit that.

I had one person the other day sign up with a rude phrase as their user name. Because I get notifications of new subscribers, I spotted that and removed them – otherwise the emails they received would have been sent to that user name and any email I sent with a personalised greeting would have been bleeped out on daytime television.

Cutting through the email clutter is not a precise science.

You can’t control other people’s lives or where they live in the world.

When your email reaches their inbox isn’t totally in control – I have people on my lists in near enough every time zone so no matter when an email gets sent out, some will be asleep, others at work or just enjoying life.

And not everyone is constantly checking their emails.

Some have decided that once or twice a day is sufficient, maybe even less. Which is actually a good time saving practice to get into (I wish I could do it more often!) as emails are often a time sink.

That means that subject lines with a time deadline are awkward at best.

Especially time deadlines measured in hours – if you send me an email about a webinar starting in hour or two but you send it after about 4pm New York time, there’s a good chance I won’t spot it until the morning after as that’s 9pm in the UK.

Likewise if I send an email at around 10am UK time – something I do quite a bit – a lot of my subscribers are asleep. But at least it stands a chance of being near the top of the email pile when they next check.

Personally, I hate emails with a subject line telling me I’ve missed something. My first reaction is “so what?” and my second reaction is to unsubscribe on the basis of why waste my time telling me about something that’s ended.

I don’t even read the message – which is probably contradicting the subject line and telling me how I can get special access to all those goodies I’d supposedly missed.

Other people may well delete the email rather than unsubscribe.

Either way if you use time sensitive email subject lines too often then it’s likely you’ll bug a lot of people on your list.

One of the best ways to come up with good subject lines is to examine the emails that somehow stand out from the crowd in your inbox.

Are they short or long?

Do they include your name?

Do they include some kind of clue as to where they came from.

For instance, the Paul Myers newsletter I subscribe to starts his subjects with [TalkBiz] then whatever the subject is,

A lot of people do the same – it can help subscribers spot your emails more easily.

If you decide to go down that route, keep it consistent. Otherwise people are more likely to miss your emails.

Experiment with subject lines to see what works best with your list – short, medium, long subjects.

Remember that most email programs truncate subject lines that are too long, so don’t get carried away.

And be careful about starting too many subject lines with re: in an attempt to pretend that you’re replying to your subscribers email.

Your “from” name is also important. You can set it in your autoresponder control panel – I’ve been using just my first name but am going to experiment with first and last name.

Your subject line is the call to action to open and read the rest of the email.

Which means that the rest of the email has to deliver whatever was promised in the subject.

Which is a whole extra topic that I’ll do my best to cover in the next post or two.

In the meantime, if you’d like a comprehensive guide to grooming your email list and getting the best response, even if you haven’t got many subscribers yet, then I highly recommend this guide from Mark Tandan.

He’s regularly on various leaderboards and it’s well worth getting, reading and implementing.