Targeted Email Marketing Works Best When You Write Crappy Headlines (Yep!)

Targeted email marketing is a fiercely competitive endeavor, and those people who are looking to maximize their lists will often spend an entire day on the hunt for some bit of extra leverage or some new trick to use to get their response rates up by a half of a percent.

This is silly.

It’s silly because of two simple reasons: one, it’s a waste of a perfectly good day. Two, the tricks to get your response rates up aren’t some sort of ancient Chinese Kung Fu miracle pill diet water. They’re the obvious ones. Ones like write better headlines. Every top SEO content producer knows these tricks, but it seems like the targeted email marketers are still trying to figure it out — so here’s the plan:

The UberPlan For To Make Perfect The Ultimate Emails For To Be Marketing

• Get Informed: Learn about your audience. Check Twitter for hashtags relating to your subject. Create Google Alerts for blog posts on your topic. Look for subReddits, MetaFilters, and other methods of aggregating relevant, non-commercial talk about your industry. Steep in it until you know the way your target audience talks and thinks.
• Pick the Best of the Aggregate: Each week, choose something that you find in your aggregates that matters to your industry, your audience, and you personally. You don’t have to stay 100% on-topic, either — you want to occasionally branch out in order to bring related but not-yet-potential-customer fodder into the fold.
• Rewrite That Piece’s Headline A Hundred Times: Then, cross out 95 of them. Take your best five and (after you’ve done the next step) do a simple A/B test, sending the test letters out to your smallest related list. Take whichever gets the best clickthrough rate and use it on the email you’re going to send to your big list.
• Write The Story From Your Shoes: Tell them accurately about what your interesting piece said about your industry, product, or company. Cite your sources. Add a relevant (but non-cliché) stock picture.
• Post It: Blast your newly-created, interesting, engaging, and most of all well-headlined email out to your list, and enjoy the rewards.

The advantages of this simple system are several. You get easy content, because you’re just rewriting someone else’s story. It’s fresh, because you’re getting it from the source as the source puts it out there. And because you took the time — and you DID take the time — to write a massive pile of crappy headlines (and then panned the gold out of the mire), you’ll get people interested from the moment their popup tells them they have an email. Win!