High-Tech Communicator

Increase Your White Paper ROI

There’s no doubt about it, white papers take considerable time, effort, and money to produce. Luckily, you can get a significant return on that investment if you know how to make the most of your white papers by repurposing them.  

Here are a few ways you can use the white papers themselves or repurpose the content in them:

• Email campaigns—Many B2B companies use white papers as a valuable “offer” for email marketing campaigns. These campaigns might be designed to either generate awareness or nurture leads that are not quite ready to make a purchase. Many B2B buyers are interested in downloading these white-paper offers because they provide valuable information.
• Webinars—Organizations often either base their webinar on the content in their white paper and/or they will provide a white paper as a “Thank You,” providing attendees with a takeaway after the webinar is over.
• Newsletters—Companies often use email newsletters as a way to keep in touch with existing customers to generate add-on sales or to nurture new leads. White papers can be the source of content for newsletter articles. For example, you can condense all or part of the white paper to create a newsletter article and then provide a link to the original.
• Trade journal articles—You can also shorten thought-leadership white papers into articles that can be published in a trade magazine. While the number of these magazines (and often the space in them) is smaller than it has been in years past, trade magazines still exist and continue to provide third-party validation and credibility for your ideas.
• Sales leave-behind—White papers that contain thought leadership or educational content make good leave-behinds for the sales force.
• Website—Because potential customers see white papers as providing valuable information, they’re often willing to register for them on your website, providing you with valuable contact information. (When using this technique, however, it’s advisable to use as short a registration form as possible to avoid annoying people.) 
• Aggregation networks—Many content-aggregation networks, such as the Tech Target Network, provide white papers on specific topics from a large number of vendors. Many potential customers go to these sites during the research stage of their purchase process to gain more information about solutions to their problems. If you want to be found, it would behoove you to go where people actively look for information.
• Blog posts—Use findings from your white paper as the basis for one or more blog posts and then provide links to them.

While white papers can be a substantial investment of time, effort and money, they also pay big dividends in terms of the myriad ways their information can be used and reused.

How do you repurpose your white papers?

Does Your Lead Nurturing Match Your Buyer’s Purchase Process?

Technology companies increasingly recognize the value of adding lead-nurturing activities to their marketing mix. The purpose of lead nurturing is to stay top-of-mind and help buyers through a purchase process that often involves considerable upfront research over a long time period—and engaging with sales reps late in the process. However, many technology companies engage in lead nurturing as if were a one-off campaign. This approach can lead to a disconnect between what marketing provides and what buyers need.

What Companies Do Right

When I work with technology companies who are running lead-nurturing campaigns, it’s clear that they’ve done their homework.  

Since different people tend to absorb information in different ways, these companies provide information resources using different media. For example, they may try to reach people initially through a mix of calls/voice mail, direct mail and email. And their informational offers will include a mix of industry research reports, white papers, webinars, videos, case studies, datasheets, brochures, and even podcasts.

These companies also do a great job of providing information that’s appropriate for buyers at different stages in the buying process. These campaigns progress from offering educational or thought-leadership content to materials discussing the company’s product and its benefits to case studies that prove the company’s claims to online demos that help the buyer evaluate alternative solutions. Often, companies provide multiple offers for each touch; for instance, an email will offer both a thought-leadership white paper and a video that discusses a similar topic for people with different learning styles.

Where Companies Can Improve

While the information does address the learning styles and informational needs of buyers, typical lead nurturing campaigns take place over a relatively short period of time—often four to eight weeks, depending on the complexity of the campaign.    

Yet the buying process takes place over many months or even years. A lead-nurturing process that extends only over a month or two is not nearly long enough to keep in touch with buyers who are not yet ready to take the next step. In order to keep in touch with these same prospects, companies may resort to a series of campaigns, but that approach can be confusing as they jump back and forth between the various steps of the buying process in the different campaigns.

A better approach is for marketers to design lead-nurturing programs that take into account the length of the typical buying process for their products, prepare a number of touches for each step of the buying processes, and allow use of an automated system that allows prospects to select which types of material they wish to see in the next installment and at what interval they’d like to see it.

Lead-Nurturing Campaign Resources

Many excellent resources are available to help marketers design lead-nurturing programs. The granddaddy of these tools is Brian Carroll’s book, “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.”

Additional online resources include:

Ardath Albee’s “Design Nurturing Programs to Drive Sales”

Marketo’s “The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing”

What has your company done to nurture leads over the full length of your customers’ buying process?

Overcoming Hidden, Emotional Objections with Lead Nurturing

Much has been written about why companies should nurture leads until they’re ready to buy. These arguments tend to be logical, typically citing the need to assist prospects through the buying process and keep your company top of mind. But arguably, an even more important reason to nurture leads is overcoming prospects’ emotional objections—specifically, their fear of buying from you.

Logical Reasons  

As you’re probably aware, the logical reason for lead nurturing is that while it’s easy enough to generate leads by attracting people to download a white paper from KnowledgeStorm or buying lists, most new leads are not yet ready to buy.

Moreover, the buying process has changed. Five or so years ago, buyers turned to the sales force relatively early in the sales process. Now, buyers prefer to do much more research online, and they engage the sales force much later in the buying process.

This makes it imperative to keep in front of leads and provide them the information they’ll need throughout their buying process until they’re ready to speak with a sales rep.

According to Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch and author of Lead Generation and the Complex Sale, up to 95 percent of qualified prospects on your website are there to research and are not yet ready to talk with a sales rep, but as many as 70 percent of them will eventually buy a product from you or your competitors. Moreover, a DemandGen report has found that on average, nurtured leads produce a 20-percent increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.

So far, this sounds cut and dried. You get leads, but they’re not yet ready to buy, so you provide useful information. You stay top-of-mind. And when they’re ready to buy, they’ll consider you.

Emotional Reasons

The catch is that the human decisions are rarely as logical as we may want to think. While people may think they’re making decisions strictly on logic, people make emotional decisions and then find facts that support their decision.

Marketo’s “The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing,” makes an interesting observation about the emotions of buyers. It notes, “In B2B marketing, there’s an asymmetry between the upside and downside of B2B purchases: the buyer may or may not be rewarded for making a good purchase, but a bad purchase can damage the buyer’s reputation and job security. As a result, fear and risk play large roles in B2B-buying decisions. Organizational risk can be dealt with rationally, but personal risk is usually unstated and hidden from the rational process. Yet, personal risk is a huge factor in B2B buying.”

The report goes on to say that it's therefore critical for B2B vendors to establish credibility and trust. And the best way to do this is by sharing useful information. If you can help frame the discussion, your company will be seen as a trusted advisor and thought leader, and if the buyer believes your company understands their problems and knows how to solve them, this reduces fear and can dramatically improve your odds of being selected for consideration and purchase.

This argument rings true from personal experience. I’ve done content marketing since the mid 1990s, first with a printed newsletter, then with an online newsletter, and later with this blog.  While I also use other forms of marketing, content has been my most consistently successful tactic for keeping in touch with prospects, winning trust, and ultimately gaining the opportunity to work with them.

So when you do lead nurturing, remember that staying top-of-mind is only half the battle. It’s just as important to minimize the fear of purchase by demonstrating through your content that they can trust you.

Can describe any lead-nurturing campaigns you’ve done that have minimized fears of your potential buyers?

Most Valuable Content and Offers for IT Buyers

MarketingSherpa, in partnership with IDG Connect, recently published an interesting study regarding the types of content and offers that IT buyers find most valuable. The report surveyed IT buyers about the specific factors that motivate them to “opt-in, open, and engage with vendor email.” The results were surprising and revealed some disparities between what IT marketers provide and what IT buyers want to see.

For example, the study found that most marketers focused on using offer types such as educational content (92%), free research reports (85%), and peer best practices (79%). Yet IT buyers said they were most likely to click on a link that offered news and articles (84%), competitive comparisons and buying guides (73%), and promotional content (70%).

It’s not that IT buyers don’t want educational content and free reports. It’s just that they’re somewhat further down the list in terms of preference—specifically 65% of IT buyers would click on educational content; 64% on educational reports.

The study also looked at the percentage by which various offer types increase the likelihood that prospective buyers will click on a particular link. Not surprisingly, there was a disconnect here as well.

Prospective buyers said they’d be more likely to click on these offers in the following percentages: promotional content (26%), online tutorials and demonstrations, competitive comparisons and buying guides, free research, and educational content (all 25%). Marketers thought the most valuable offers were educational content (27%), free research reports (26%), and competitive comparisons and buying guides (21%).

The Impact of Buyers’ Guides

The most striking finding was how valuable buyers found buyers’ guides. This jibes with my own experience.

During the mid 80s, when I was an editor at PC Magazine, one of my first major projects was managing a special issue about investment software. The reviewers I hired all worked for major brokerage firms including Smith Barney and Shearson Lehman. Despite the fact that we paid them very little for the reviews, I had no trouble convincing any of the firms to participate.

Part of the reason they wanted to undertake the considerable effort necessary to participate in the project was undoubtedly the publicity. (At that time, PC Magazine regularly thumped onto people’s doorsteps at 500 pages every two weeks, so the publication was literally a big deal.) But the reason they stated was that they wanted to make sure they were aware of the capabilities of all the packages out there—they didn’t want to miss any options. No other publication provided that capability. By doing comprehensive product reviews, PC Magazine became a dominant player in the industry for years.

Now, however, with the decline of trade publications, buyers still need that competitive analysis. Although they’re undoubtedly aware that vendors will not provide unbiased evaluations of their competitors’ products, they find these comparisons useful because they do provide a framework for comparison and evaluation.  

What offers should you use?

The bottom line of this research is that buyers will click on the offer that matches where they are in the buying cycle. So you can’t go wrong by finding out where buyers are at and providing them the appropriate material—whether it’s an educational piece early on in the process or a buyers’ guide that helps them narrow down the field.  

What types of content and offers do you find most appealing to prospects?

What Types of Content Should You Use for Lead-Nurturing Campaigns?

With today’s long buying cycles, you realize it may take quite awhile before the leads you glean from lead-generation efforts are ready to make a purchase. In the meantime, you want your company to stay on the customer’s radar screen. And in the process, you want to take the opportunity to influence the way they design their RFP—so when they’re ready to make a purchase, it’s more likely to be your product.

As a result, companies are increasingly adding lead-nurturing campaigns (some companies also call these lead-cultivation campaigns) to their marketing mix.  

As with any campaign, it takes a number of touches before people become aware of and remember your message. So you want to design these lead-nurturing campaigns to expand on similar themes and messages over a period of time.

Here are some examples of lead-nurturing campaigns and the content they include:

Touch 1: Webinar from an industry analyst talking about the magnitude of the problem with a follow up paper summarizing the key takeaway points from the Webinar.

Touch 2: Thought-leadership white paper written by your company talking about the challenge, what’s missing in current solutions, and what’s necessary to solve it. This paper should describe your solution in an objective-sounding manner without naming it explicitly in an effort to influence the RFP.

Touch 3: White paper or application note specifically about your product and how it addresses the issue.

Touch 4: Case study showing a particular customer and how they addressed the problem using your product. This serves as a proof point that high-profile customers are using your product.

Touch 5: Hands-on online demo showing how the product works

Touch 6: Package that pulls out the ROI other customers have achieved from the solution to help the prospect sell the solution internally to the finance department.

Touch 7: Expanded case study demonstrating your company’s expertise in implementing the product and training users so that it creates a solution that addresses their individual issues.

While many campaigns include fewer touches—typically three to four—this gives you an idea of the types of content people are using in lead-nurturing campaigns.

As you create your touches, think about including different types of media. Some touches might be print collateral, others might be podcasts or Webinars. Different people prefer to see information differently—for example, I prefer white papers, my business partner prefers podcasts.

You’ve probably already created many of the items.  The idea is to use them in an integrated manner to both reinforce your messages and expand on them, thereby keeping your prospects engaged and interested and judging other vendor’s products against yours until they’re ready to buy.

What have been your experiences with lead nurturing campaigns?

Email Marketing Writing Best Practices Series: 11 Ways to Improve Your Landing Pages

Your customer or prospect has successfully run the gauntlet. Your subject line, from line, and preview pane have enticed them into clicking on your email. Now they’re intrigued enough by your email teaser copy to click on a link to download your offer.  The last thing you want to do now is fumble the ball—and lose them just as your goal of getting your offer into their hands is in sight.

That’s why your landing page copy better be good.

For a B2B email campaign, the landing page is the lead-capture page that your audience sees when they click on the links to your offer. It’s the place where your transaction occurs—where you get them to provide you with valuable personal information and they can access your valuable content. Your goal is to get the prospect to take your desired action.

So what should the landing page copy say and contain to make this information trade go as smoothly as possible?

As with anything, you’re ultimate answer will lie in testing. But here are some best practices and suggestions to try:

1.    Make sure the landing page is crafted to work in tandem with the content of your email communication. The landing page should match the look, feel, and tone of the original email.

2.    The landing page should have only one objective, which should be getting your reader to do the one thing you want them to do. Usually for a B2B email lead-generation or lead-cultivation campaign, that will be to download the offer.

3.    The headline should refer directly to the web copy that drove the click. Match your language as exactly as you can to that of the headline of your original email.

4.    Provide a clear call to action, whether you use graphic buttons, hot-linked text or both to tell your visitor what they need to do. That call to action should match that of your original email. Again, in a B2B lead-generation or cultivation-campaign the call to action will often consist of filling in a form and downloading the offer.

5.    Keep your copy on point as a logical progression from your headline and offer. Don’t digress.

6.    Keep your copy short—especially for an informational offer from a B2B campaign. If at all possible, keep all content “above the fold,” i.e. where they can see it without scrolling.

7.    Make copy scannable—Readers won’t read every word of your landing page. They will quickly scan the page. Make sure your headlines, subheadings quickly reiterate what you’re offering and how it benefits them, and make sure it clearly points out how they can easily take the desired action.

8.    Make your copy enticing. If your offer is a white paper, consider providing some valuable sample copy from your paper. This can include a compelling abstract that details the challenges prospects face and how your white paper addresses those challenges.

9.    If you ask people to fill out a form to obtain the offer as part of lead-generation campaign, keep it brief. Remember, this form may be the first step of your sales process. You don’t want to scare off prospects by asking for too much information.

10.   If you are requesting information, provide a link to your privacy policy. Be sure your privacy policy states that you do not rent, sell, or share information with other parties.

11.   Test. As with every other aspect of your email content and creative, test different copy and other elements on your landing pages to see what works best.

That’s the end of my series on best practices for email marketing content. I’ll move on to other topics in the next blog—but will continue to cover email marketing from time to time.

Share your tips for creating effective landing pages.

Email Marketing Writing Best Practices Series: Making the Most of Your From Line

In previous posts in this series, I talked about subject lines and how they’re the most important part of your email marketing message. After all, up to five times more people see your subject line as will see your message. But there’s one other critical piece of information that recipients want to see before they’ll even consider opening your email message. That’s the from line.

Because your recipients receive so much spam, they’re leery of senders they don’t know. The from line. creates recognition by communicating who you are as a sender. 

To be effective, your from line needs to be personal and reinforce the one-to-one relationship you have with your recipients.

A report by PinPointe Marketing provided the following tips to improve the effectiveness of your from lines. These include:

· Always include a valid email address

· It’s usually better to include a person’s name and company rather than just the company

For example, use:

“Cheryl Goldberg” cheryl@cjgoldbergcommunications.com

Better yet, use:

“Cheryl Goldberg, Goldberg Communications” Cheryl@cjgoldbergcommunications.com 

Never use a subject line like:

“info@company.com

“Do Not Reply”<Prospect_list@company.com>

Your from line and subject line ideally should work together. For example, some have suggested that it’s a good idea to incorporate your brand in the first part of the subject line to ensure a high level of recognition. However, you face distinct plusses and minuses to doing this.

· On the plus side, incorporating your brand into your subject line supports recognition and for some vendors, that alone will be enough to encourage people to open the email.

· On the minus side, a long company name can take room away from your message.

One way around this tradeoff is to make sure your subject line, from line, and preview pane work together. You may be able to include branding in your from line and preview pane to avoid the need to include it in the subject line.

And with that I have my segue to the topic of my next post: Preview panes.

 

What types of from lines have you used and what’s your experience?

Email Marketing Writing Best Practices Series: 18 Do’s and Don’ts for Message Body Copy

Once you’ve written the ideal subject line, from line, and preview pane to pull people into your email message, your job has only just begun. Now you need to use the teaser copy within your message to encourage your prospects and customers to click through to your offer, whether that’s a white paper, a webinar, a case study, an analyst thought-leadership report, a demo, or a podcast.

And even when they have your offer in hand, your work still isn’t done. Your offer is simply another way to get them to take the next small step in what can often be a lengthy and complex sales process—but we’re getting ahead of ourselves

So how do ensure that your email content gets people to take that next step and grab your offer? Here are 18 do’s and don’ts for producing email content that performs this job effectively:

1.    Do—Personalize your copy with the recipient’s name to grab their attention. In fact, this is a much better place to personalize than the subject line because it reads more like a real email. This type of personalization won’t have the spammy connotations that often plague personalized subject lines

2.    Do—Include a benefit-oriented title so your readers immediately understand “what’s in it for me.”

3.    Do—Write copy that reads like it comes from a real person. Email is a highly personal communication medium. Even if the email is a blast to a list, you want to maintain that one-to-one feel. Be sure your language is simple, clear, and direct. Eliminate the passive voice and excise marketing jargon.

4.    But don’t—Be too informal. While you want your email to sound like it’s from a real person, it’s still a type of business communication. Your message should have the same professional tone you might use when speaking to a client on the phone, at a meeting, or during a presentation. 

5.    Do—Include an opening paragraph that pulls readers in. Often in B2B communications from technology companies, the first paragraph indicates that the message is targeted to a highly specific audience about their particular challenges, such as retailers who need to be sure they comply with labor laws. 

6.    Do—Make sure your opening paragraph also briefly states how your offer can help solve that problem.

7.    Do—State explicitly what you want the reader to do—for example, download the offer.

8.    Do—Detail the benefits of downloading your offer.

9.    Do—Include links to multiple offers. For example, in addition to the primary offer of a white paper, you might also include a link to an archived webinar on the same or a related topic.

10.   But don’t –Give your readers the choice of too many offers. Limit yourself to about three offers to avoid confusing your readers.

11.   Do—Provide multiple links to your main offer. Ideally you’ll want at least one link right up front, one in the middle of the email, and a third link in a sidebar. According to Pinpointe’s “Email Marketing Writing Tips to Improve Email Results,” The average click-through for campaigns with one link is 6.8% and for campaigns with two links is 8.57%, which means the improvement with the extra link is greater than 25%.

12.   Do—Pay attention to and test the way you word the link to your offer. Evidence suggests that a more positive and active call to action (CTA) (“find” or “learn”) works better than a negative or passive one (“read”). But there are caveats. The CTA needs to make contextual sense—don’t use “find out more” if your link doesn’t tell them anything worth finding out. Also, remember that different CTAs will resonate with different people and the most effective CTA may change over time.

13.   Don’t—Include too many paragraphs. In an analysis of clickthroughs on teaser copy for his newsletter, Mark Brownlow reported in his blog “Email Marketing Reports,” that the best length for teaser copy in email message is two paragraphs, each with four to six lines.  

14.   Don’t—Incorporate large blocks of text. Instead, use short paragraphs and bullet points to make the copy easy to skim online.

15.   Do—Comply with CAN-SPAM regulations. Always show the recipient who the email came from, include a postal address, and offer an opt-out mechanism.

16.   Do—Write Alt-Text tags and photo captions. Because graphics are often disabled in the preview pane, you want people to know what was meant to be in your images, and good captions can be a sales tool in their own right.

17.   Do—test your content.

18.   Don’t--Assume that anything that works now will continue to work forever. Continue testing over time.

What tips do you have to share regarding email content?

Next time, I’ll talk about “from lines.”

Email Marketing Writing Best Practices Series: 5 More Subject Line Tips

 

Because subject lines are the most important content in your marketing emails, they have to be good.  So it’s not surprising that subject lines have received plenty of analysis. This series presents the highlights. 

Last time, I discussed five best practices for writing email subject lines. This post presents five more.    

1. Should you personalize subject lines?

 

One common question is whether to personalize the subject line with the name of your recipient.

The answer: It depends.

Using a person’s name clearly perks up their interest and implies that the message is relevant to them.

Yet B2B marketers also face more risks when using this technique than those doing B2C. Some caveats:

· You want your emails to sound as much like personal mail as possible and personal email rarely includes the receiver’s name.

· Spam often puts the person’s first name in the subject line—and the last thing you want is to sound like spam.

· Personalized subject lines can backfire if the actual email content is clearly broadcast in nature and not specific to the recipient.

· If you do try personalization, be sure that your database is accurate and you spell the person’s name correctly or the whole idea will backfire.

As a result, for most technology companies marketing B2B, it’s better to save your personalization for the salutation inside your email. Even if you’re trying for a more conversational tone, the vast majority of B2B communications employ a professional tone and you want your subject lines to match. If you know French, the typical tone for high-tech communications is akin to using “Vouz” when addressing someone you don’t know very well. Using someone’s first name in an email subject line is more like using  “Tu,” which the French reserve for family and friends. It’s off-putting for marketers to use “Tu” in the wrong circumstance.

2. Place content in the right order

Since you can never be sure exactly how long an email subject line will be for your recipient, put the most important messages first. Which messages are most important depends on your priorities and your campaign. Those for whom branding is the most important will want the company name to appear first.  The benefit or the offer will be the priorities for other campaigns.

3. Avoid Sounding like Spam.

You need to avoid words that sound like Spam. But what wordsare those?

Most people agree that using multiple exclamation points and all caps are sure spam signs. 

Yet, many words are controversial. Take the word “free.” Some say never use “free” because it’s spammy.  Others say the high response rate usually associated with free makes it worth the risk.

To make matters worse, spam filters are no longer the answer. Today’s email filters are increasingly reputation based. Your biggest challenge is avoiding the spam prejudices of the people you’re sending the email to. Your best bet is to use common sense. If the email’s subject line looks like something a spammer might write, your readers will treat it as spam.

4. Comply with CAN-SPAM Laws

Many anti-spam laws include provisions regarding subject line content. Check your local laws for details. However, a good rule of thumb is to make sure your subject lines accurately represent the content of the email.

5. Test Your Copy

So now that you’ve seen all these rules, you might be hoping for the big reveal that shows you examples of the ideal subject lines for your emails.

No such luck.

Sometimes the most boring sounding subject lines will pull the best. Not even experts can’t  predict what subject line will pull the best.

The only way to determine which emails will pull the best is to test them, test them, then test them some more. So write different subject lines to test different variables. And  if you’re sending your email to multiple market segments, test your subject lines for each one.

What are your best practices for B2B subject lines?

In my next post in this series on writing email marketing content, I’ll talk about body copy…

Email Marketing Writing Best Practices: 5 Tips for Subject Lines

Email marketing campaigns are among the most popular ways to reach prospects and customers. According to a report by Ipsos commissioned by Habeus, 67% of businesses employ email communications, a number which is expected to remain stable over the next five years.

In my own marketing writing business, I’ve seen a significant uptick in requests for content for email campaigns. Many of these campaigns are used for nurturing good leads who are not yet ready to buy. Other companies, realizing that the easiest sales are usually to existing customers, use email campaigns to remain top of mind with and upsell to customers.

Naturally, with this growing investment in email marketing and tight overall marketing dollars, marketing departments want to get the greatest bang for their buck with their email marketing campaigns. Indeed, when one of my clients, a large technology company in the Boston area first hired me, one of her questions was about my knowledge of email marketing content best practices. That got me thinking, what a great idea for a blog…

My next few posts will therefore present a series of best practices for improving the copy you create for emails used in email marketing campaigns.

My first posts in this series focus on THE most important content component of your email campaign: your subject line.  Clearly, no one will see the rest of your message if your subject line is ineffective. According to a recent report by PinPoint, 8 out of 10 people will skim/read your email subject line while less than 2 in 10 will read the rest and take action. Moreoever, at least 40% of a reader’s decision to open or take action is based on the email subject and “From” line, while 69% of recipients decide whether to report email as spam based on the subject line.

This post and the next will discuss 10 best practices for subject lines.  

1. Follow the 50/50 rule

When writing emails, many marketers save the subject line for last and devote minimal time to it. Big mistake. Because of the importance of subject lines, most experts recommend that you spend 50% of your time on the subject line and intro of your email, and 50% on everything else, including the design.

2. Set the right goals

Marketers often think that the purpose of subject lines is simply to get people to open your email. But if that’s all you want to do, your best bet would be to write a subject line that says something like “Increase Your Sex Appeal 1,000%.” Clearly that won’t do for most business emails.  

Indeed, many years ago, an editor at PC Magazine put a picture of a sexy (clothed) woman on the cover of an issue about Laptop Computers with the express purpose of boosting newsstand sales—while he may have met that objective, he set off a firestorm of criticism and outrage. Was this worth the extra newsstand interest? Not really.

So clearly, the goal of a B2B email subject line isn’t just to get people to open the email.

Rather, you want to persuade readers to open the email and to take some appropriate action. For example, with B2B lead generation or nurturing email campaigns your immediate goal may be to get people to attend a webinar, download a whitepaper, listen to a podcast, go through a demo and so on. And your ultimate purpose is to take the customer to the next step in the buying process.

To meet those goals, your subject line needs to generate: Recognition, Interest, and Action.

· Recognition—When people receive an email that they don’t recognize, they are likely to ignore it, delete it, or report it as spam. Therefore, as a permission-based email marketer, your subject line has to inform people that the email comes from someone to whom they gave permission and is something they’re comfortable receiving.

· Interest—Here’s where your subject line has to get people to open the email.

· Action—The ultimate goal of your email is to get people to take an action, whether that’s a click, a download, a reply, a purchase….

3. Find the Right Length

Conventional wisdom has it that when it comes to subject line length, shorter is better, and that ideally subject lines should be no longer than 35-50 characters.   

One reason for that rule of thumb is that email clients once limited the length of subject lines. If the subject line was longer, it would be cut off. Today, most email clients allow users to show up to 100 characters and to control how they view an email subject line when they configure their email. Thus, previous tight limits no longer apply.

Given that it is now possible to use longer subject lines, Alchemy Worx analyzed subject lines for more than 200 million emails. They found that the relationship between subject line length and results is not as simple as was previously thought.

The research found that:

· Subject lines of less than 60 characters are best for optimizing open rates.

· However, click-to-open rates (CTOR) are optimized with subject lines of over 70 characters. The CTOR rate is the ratio of unique clicks to unique opens. It is a measure of how effective your message is in motivating the recipient to click once they have opened the message. Thus, it is an indication of the relevance of your message.

Alchemy Worx theorizes that the reason for these results is that the most common way to maximize open rates is to use ambiguous or potentially misleading subject lines—a technique often used by spammers. Shorter subject lines are more likely to be ambiguous or misleading than longer ones.

Getting more people for whom the message is relevant to open the email requires a subject line that is specific and detailed, which usually requires more words or characters.

4. Decide What to Say

Mail Chimp analyzed more than 40 million emails looking for those with the highest and lowest open rates. It then pulled 20 from each pile and compared them side by side. The highest open rates ranged from 60% to 87% and the lowest performer s fell in the 1% to 14% range.

You can access MailChip’s list here.

Pinpoint performed a similar study. You can see examples here.  

Mail Chimps conclusion: The best subject tell the reader what the email is about without being salesy or pushy. The worst ones read like headlines from advertisements.

Similarly, a recent survey of consumers by Return Path found that the most effective subject lines for catching attention were those that ”clearly state the offer.”

One interesting aside: Newsletters, which presumably are permission based vehicles that provide value for customers, are among the highest pulling types of emails in these lists.

5. Make it Interesting

Although subject lines must tell readers clearly what the email’s about, they don’t have to be boring—although I’ve seen many boring subject lines that have pulled amazingly well.  Proven copywriting techniques commonly used by technology companies include the following:

· Emphasize benefits. This is among the most common type of subject lines for technology campaigns. It’s effective because it clearly explains to the reader “What’s In It for Me.”   

· Tell readers “How to” “Best Practices” “X Steps to…”.These offer the promise of valuable information that can presumably help the reader do their job better, improve sales or reduce costs. Again, these subject lines are effective for their  huge “what’s in it for me” factor.

· The news subject line. This works well if the customer has signed up for information about new products or services from your company.

·  Subject lines that use urgency to create anxiety. In technology email campaigns, you’ll often see these in emails where the offer is a Webinar or teleseminar—which by nature is a limited time offer because the event takes place at a certain time. These subject lines are also very common in B2C communications. For example, both HP and Dell constantly send me limited time offers.

Mequoda Daily recently created a whitepaper called “The 13 Best Email Subject Lines” that talks about additional types of subject lines.  When reviewing these subject lines, however, consider which are appropriate for B2B communications. Some subject lines that are perfectly acceptable for B2C communications sound spammy when used for B2B.  

In my next post, you’ll find 5 more best practices regarding subject lines.

What are your thoughts on the rules I’ve presented so far?