A good quality email is a mixture of effective elements. Most articles, start at the begging rather than the end, but on this occasion I want to share with you a simple and often overlooked element that will increase the responsiveness of your email and that is how you sign off your email. The following article by Betsy Mikel very much confirms my own finding and beliefs which I think you will find interesting:
Which sign-off do you think is best for professional emails?
Let’s see if you can guess which of these closings the data proved to be the most effective for replies.
Sincerely
Cheers
Warmly
Thanks
Regards
Best
Take care
Ciao
Talk soon
Looking forward to your thoughts
Your initials
[No closing at all]
The answer? Those that express gratitude. “Emails that closed with a variation of thank you got significantly more responses than emails ending with other popular closings,” Greenley writes. Here are the exact numbers: Emails that ended in Thanks in advance had a 65.7 percent response rate. Of emails that ended in Thanks, 63 percent got responses. The third most effective closing was Thank you with a 57.9 percent response rate. Across the board, Boomerang found that sign-offs that included some sort of expression of gratitude had a 36 percent relative increase in average response rate.
The worst way to end your emails
It’s also worth exploring a couple of the lowest-performing sign-offs on the list. It turns out that ending your email in Regards or Best could be dooming your response potential. In the 350,000 email threads they examined, Boomerang found Best was the worst performer of them all.
Last week we mentioned that in addition to tried-and-true consulting firms who truly have your best interest at heart, there are also less-than-savory consultants out there who send you bogus reports from cockamamie websites trying to prove to you that your website is on its last leg and you simply cannot go another day without their expertise.
Unfortunately, to the untrained eye, these dummy reports and smooth-talking salesmen can look pretty compelling.
If you start looking into your own stats—from reputable sources like Google Analytics or your marketing automation software—you'll be familiar with your company's data, and therefore you should be a little better about being able to pick out the professional companies from the snake oil salesmen.
So, while this isn't necessarily a comprehensive list, looking at these metrics is sure to give you at least a high-level overview of how your marketing efforts are going:
Communication. It’s the only way to demonstrate your product’s value to potential customers. Your goal is to convey information about new features, successful case studies, and industry trends. Converting B2B free trial users into paying customers involves lots of communication about why your product trumps competitors. In-app messaging is a powerful tool to send on-time,
Technical challenges aren’t the problem. They might be a problem. A hurdle for sure. But it’s rarely THE biggest problem responsible for traction or flaming out. Likewise, churn is an issue. It can send you in a negative tailspin. But again, top line growth masks all. Papers over enough cracks until you can get your
For some reason, people tend to be equating SaaS companies with free trials. I find this pretty bad indeed. Here’s why: It’s true that many software companies see outstanding results with the free trial business model, but it doesn’t imply that everyone should use it. That’s just silly. Every single business is different, and the
These are probably the main reasons you should consider email:Email marketing is significantly cheaper and faster than traditional mail, mainly because of the high cost and time required in a traditional mail campaign for producing the artwork, printing, addressing and mailing.
Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
Today Email marketing is a very easy way for promoting our business and website.
Your email list is your most VALUABLE asset!Persuading interested prospects to opt-in to your email list should be your NO:1 Priority as once they have subscribed to your list/newsletter you’re in a great position to influence and educate them on a regular basis. The simple rule for success is that you always provide them with additional and useable value in easily digestible chunks. Do this and you will rapidly build a trusting relationship and your prospect may become purchase receptive and sales could follow close behind. The following link will highlight exactly how to master the process of using email to build trusting relationships with your prospects.
How you obtain your prospects email address is really important.
For that reason, the following article by Kristen Dunleavy goes into depth about the ethics of email marketing and the correct way of subscribing prospects to your list:
Best Practices for Permission-Based Email Marketing
Seth Godin has a specific message about permission for email marketers: “Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission.”
Asking permission is not only polite, but it’s also good business. As Campaign Monitor puts it: “Businesses that get it right and build permission-based email lists enjoy high open and click-through rates on their campaigns, and are able to drive significant levels of sales and revenue from their email marketing initiatives. Businesses who get it wrong on the other hand, see low open and click-through rates on their email campaigns and miss out on potential sales and revenue.”
And email marketers who fail to get permission face additional pitfalls, says MailChimp. “People who haven’t given you permission are more likely to report your campaigns as spam, and less likely to engage with your campaigns or make purchases. Spam reports can lead to aggressive spam filtering or blacklisting, which makes it impossible for some subscribers to receive any of your campaigns.” Their bottom line: “It’s in your best interest to always secure express permission.”
Permission also has a regulatory aspect. It is one of the foundational aspects of the CAN-SPAM Act, which gives recipients the right to have marketers stop emailing them, and can penalize marketers who fail to do that. Campaigner provides a list of seven ways to ensure you are in compliance with CAN-SPAM Act provisions here.
Types of permission-based marketing
According to Campaign Monitor, there are two types of permission in email marketing: express and implied.
“You have implied permission to email somebody if you have an existing business relationship with them. This could mean they are a current customer, donate to your charity, or are an active member of your website, club or community.”
When it comes to opting into your list there is always a big debate over whether or not you should employ single or double opt-in so below is a video on the topic.
Finally, I came across this interesting article by Alexia Bullard which offers some excellent insights on how to get people to opt into your list which I am sure you will benefit from reading.
4 Tips for Boosting Your Email Marketing Strategy
Every business owner wants to expand and grow their client base, and email marketing is one of the most powerful tools for both getting and nurturing leads.
A few years back, there were a lot of marketers who loudly declared email marketing was a thing of the past. Yet, they were obviously wrong.
Email marketing is evolving as rapidly as the rest of technology, and helps ensure you get one of the highest returns on the resources you’re investing in your marketing efforts.
However, you know not every email is going to get opened. Some of them go straight to spam, and some are just ignored. And then BOOM, there’s the end of your email marketing campaign for that lead.
That’s why you’ve got to step up your game, and these four surefire tips for boosting your email marketing strategy are going to help you do exactly that.
Implement Effective Opt-In Options
In order to have effective email marketing campaigns you need…well…email list subscribers.
But, don’t go rushing out to buy lists. None of the people on those lists asked for you to send them content, and it’s hard for you to be sure they were okay with their information being shared with third parties.
If you’ve inherited the job of trying to figure out how to take your marketing to the digital space, you’re probably finding that there’s way more to it than you originally anticipated. Whether you’ve never done any sort of digital marketing, or if there have been a few starts and stops by other people along the way, you’ve probably discovered you have a mess to sort out… and you don’t quite know where to start.
How wonderful is it, then, that there are companies who will help you sort through the mess? Someone will take a look at your branding, your resources, your assets, and your current activities, and put that into some sort of framework for you. Then they will provide you with a roadmap to digital marketing success. How could you possibly pass this up?
Before you go trusting random strangers with the growth of your business, let’s run through a few things to be mindful of going in.
When you understand the results email marketing can deliver you’ll be hooked!It took me years to fully commit to email marketing and all of its ramifications, but when I did the financial side of my business started to get much easier as I now had a list of warm purchase ready prospects that I had
Facebook advertising is a big auction. There are both winners and losers. Now, you wouldn’t want to be on the losing side, would you? So, what can you do to create Facebook campaigns that finish the race as champions, having collected many new customers in the process? A smart move would be creating ads that
Humans are social animals – we’re inexplicably fascinated by what others do, say and think. And it’s not just curiousity – our intentions and actions are shaped by a herd mentality that nudges us towards conformity (Journal of Consumer Research, 2014). And our behaviour when booking holidays or travel plans is no different – we
Unlimited success is a formula which anyone can follow! I was asked today what is the most important ingrediant for being successful and that question really made me think hard. The answer I think is whatever it is that you have decided to do or master, just stay with it until you master it or
Uber might be King of Growth Hacking. The one everyone fawns over. The media adores. Growth Hackers join. But these kind of companies are the exceptions. Their ascent so quick and scale so massive that the vast majority of us can’t play by the same rules. Instead, we need to look around. At the regular
Your reputation has as much impact on your life as what you actually do.
Early assumptions about you are sticky and are difficult to change.
The single best way to maintain your reputation is to do things you're proud of. Gaming goes only so far.
In a connection economy, what other people think about you, their
expectations of you, the promises they believe you make—this is your
brand. It's easy to imagine that good work is its own reward, but good
work is only of maximum value when people get your reputation right, and
they usually get that from others, not directly from you.
It's logical, then, to care about how your reputation is formed.
But it's dangerous, I think, to decide that it's worth spending a lot of
time gaming the system, to consistently work hard to make your
reputation better than you actually are.
There is one exception: The most important step you can take when
entering a new circle, a new field or a new network is to take vivid
steps to establish a reputation. This is the new kid who stands up to a
bully the first day of school, or a musician who holds off on a first
single until she's got something to say. They say you never get a second
chance to make a first impression, but what most people do is make no
impression at all.
That reputation needs to be one you can live with for the long haul, because you'll need to.
As the social networks make it more and more difficult for people to
have a significant gap between reputation and reality (hence gossip),
the single best strategy appears to be as you are, or more accurately,
to live the life you've taught people to expect from you.
Your reputation isn't merely based on your work, it's often the
result of biases and expectations that existed before you even showed
up. That's not fair but it's certainly true. Now that we see that the
structures exist, each of us has the ability to over-invest in
activities and behaviors that maximize how we'll be seen by others
before we arrive.
Be your reputation, early and often, and you're more likely to have a reputation you're glad to own.
Hi Everyone, my name is Donald and I am building my career in reputation marketing which is a very big and underutilzed field of expertese. So keep focused on this blog to discover more as well as the big IM picture in general.
