Emails looking tired – give them a facelift!

Emailing has been our daily business workhorse for a long time now! There’s a feeling that it’s become simply dull and uninteresting compared to using shiny new social networking! With the advent of GoogleWave next year, emailing will be cool again – so it’s time to breathe new life into your emails!

Here are a few quick and easy actions you can take which won’t be traumatic – or cost you anything at all:

Text-only email: standard brand identity wisdom dictates a specific approach to designing an email that may not be appropriate to the medium. Send an all-text email once in a while – a change of pace and approach will at least arouse interest because it’s different!

Crazy headlines: subject lines that sum up the point of the email in short, plain, direct language gives the best email-open response. However, humorous, silly or crazy subject lines, e.g. bad puns, odd turns of phrase – will open up emails! If the right tone is struck, a ‘funny’ from time to time arouses interest.

Inject personality: we all know that the success of social media is because it is instant, friendly and personal. Email has always been a one-to-one experience, but with some companies, it is still left behind in the era of hiding behind the corporate wall of formal jargon. Recipients are used to and expect ‘informal’ communication – they will not be interested either to read or find about your brand if it is not relaxed, open, welcoming and transparent. ‘Personality’- being different – encourages curiosity and gets emails read!

Change email-sending day: email service providers can show open and click rates by day of week! But these only reflect a routine pattern of a regular same day email sending, solely based on a stat showing best open and click day – which then would change again. It’s always best to experiment and monitor to see what works best for you. Monitor changing behaviour and modify yours accordingly.

Finally – break your own rules: most rules come from experience, and most of the time, these rules work. However, it never hurts to break a rule once just to see if the time has come to revise the rule. See what a few tweaks can do to fine tune your marketing model – give it a breath of fresh air from time-to-time and keep your customers interested!