What is the point of writing your customers an email or a newsletter if they don’t open it?   A successful email campaign depends completely on having a compelling subject line.  Here are the top five ways to drastically increase the chances of your emails being opened, and read, by your clients, and potential clients.

1.  Use customers’ names within the subject line: Research has shown that people are much more likely to pay attention to subject lines that use their name.

2.  Avoid spam words:  Words such as free, SPAM, weight loss, diet, lose weight, and mortgage will raise red flags with most email servers and increase the likelihood of your message ending up in the SPAM filter.  Disguise these words with asterisks or spaces if you can’t avoid using them.

3.  Ask good questions: The best way to improve open rates is to capture your subscribers’ interest.  A compelling question which they can’t resist finding the answer to will increase click through rates.  Remember not to ask questions they already know the answer to, or don’t want the answer to.  For example, “Do you know about Superfoods ?”, wouldn’t be a great question because many people know about superfoods.  “What are the Top 5 superfoods for fat metabolism?” is a much more compelling question.

4.  Convey Urgency: Play upon a fear of loss when sending promotional emails.  “Today only”, “Two days only”, “Limited Time Only”, etc are examples of ways to express that time is of the esssence.

5.  Define Benefits: By clearly defining the benefits contained within an email, there is an opportunity to pique interest.  For example,  in  the month of October I usually title my health counseling newsletter “Top 10 Breast Cancer Prevention Tips”.  Most people have been affected by breast cancer in some way and want to learn more about prevention.

Try these top five tips for increasing email open rates, and compare to previous open rates once these new strategies are in place.  Check back soon for more copywriting tips.