I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I come away from every REBarCamp with at least one solid nugget. That could be an idea, a technique, a new website app or tool.
Last week I was at REBarCamp Myrtle Beach. It was their first. Almost all of the attendees were first time REBarCampers.
I was helping to moderate the conversation in a “Drip Campaign” session and we were talking about different mailing list providers (Mailchimp, aWeber, Constant Contact). We got around to some of the key issues in drip campaigns – OPEN RATES and CLICK THRU RATES.
When you send out an email campaign there are two things you want to track, how many people actually opened the email and how many people actually clicked on something in that email. That click could be to play a video, read more of the story, or order a product or service.
Of course you can’t get them to click on anything if they don’t open the email to begin with.
That’s where Tad Fulford tossed out this nugget. I’ll paraphrase…
“You need to have a compelling title to get them to open”
Simple and obvious I know, but very true. I generally write both a compelling title and meta description for each of my blog posts. That way, when you see it in Google or Facebook you’ll be enticed to click and read more. But that’s not an email campaign.
I started thinking about my own drip campaign system. I use Mailchimp and have an automatic newsletter go out each time I write a blog post (3 times a week). While the posts each have a compelling title guess what they all look like in an inbox?
Even so I’ve had a pretty good Open Rate and CTR, but we could always do better – right?
So I walked away from REBarCamp, changed the settings in my own email campaign from a set “Post of the day from…” to the actual blog post title. For the same newsletter, same system, still fully automatic, the last post I wrote looked like this:
This blog post will have the title, “Did you hear what happened in Myrtle Beach?” and so on. This was what Tad used as an example in that session.
On one hand I want my titles to reflect what the post is about. How Apple Pay Works is about exactly that. On the other hand, don’t want to write overly sensational headlines as I think we’re all getting tired of the click bait “you’ll never believe what happened next…” Crap. Somewhere in between is a sweet spot I’ll be striving for.
Will it increase my open rates? It should. I’ll have a follow up in a month or so when we have some solid data.
I picked up a few more nuggets that I’ll likely share in the future. Of course you’ll hear about them first if you’ve signed up for my newsletter (hint hint). Did you know I build newsletter systems like this and could build one for you? Email me or look for the link in my newsletter for more information.
Mike Mueller
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one,bought a cool orange one, and still rides a really slow one), he loves strong beer and good red wine.
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