In a Chief Marketer Column, Grant Johnson examines the state of email marketing in light of today’s increasingly overstuffed inbox.

He cites the battles marketers face in their attempts to achieve and sustain high email opening rates (online marketers keep hoping RSS syndication and other media channels will solve this problem), and offers one solution in this passage:

The obvious take-away is that the subject line is probably the most important part of your e-mail and deserves quite a bit of attention.

The not so obvious take-away is that increasing trust is central to increasing open and conversion rates. That means your copy is the key to gaining and keeping a high level of confidence from your recipients. What length works best?

Johnson writes with a great deal of knowledge, though his “obvious” take-away isn’t so much obvious as it is traditional. Yes, headline length is critical, but fudging with copy length - while important - also has the taste of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

eMail volume is not about to start slacking off, and frankly, a lot of the low-hanging testing fruit has already been plucked.

Instead of mucking about with headlines for marginal increases in open rates, why not engage readers to the point where they’re eagerly anticipating your next email?

In other words, maybe it’s time marketers worried a little less about the immediate results of their efforts, focusing instead on the long-term benefits of tactics like engagement marketing.

This has the added benefit of offering customers a retained image (previous high quality content) beyond the email subject line; if customers and prospects were engaged with high-quality content on previous communications, then the “from” line on the email promises more to the reader than almost any headline could.

We all receive emails from entities which are opened immediately - almost regardless of headline. We’re highly engaged readers, and email marketers looking to dramatically boost open rates should look for ways to tap into that level of customer response.

Engagement Marketing for Email

Admittedly, engaging with customers and prospects via shared passions and values is a hard sell to metrics-crazy online marketers.

Fuzzy, harder-to-define engagement metrics are still in their infancy, and aggressive online marketers have grown fond of driving a stake through the heart of any program not generating immediate results.

Still, the long-term perspective shouldn’t be ignored - especially once the lifetime value of customers becomes a part of the conversation.

Let me be clear; I’m not advocating an end to testing. It’s valuable information, and often acquired at very reasonable cost. And engagement marketing simply doesn’t apply to some markets or products.

Still, it’s time marketers looked beyond adding or subtracting 12 characters from their email headlines in an attempt to boost open rates.

Instead, engaging with customers (whenever possible) promises to deliver open rate increases far beyond the fractional - and often transient - increases offered by simple testing methods.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.

engagement marketing, email marketing, marketing

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