The reason most of us receive more than we might want (especially, you can’t help noticing, in the run-up to the festive season!) is because, well, actually, we do want them. We sign up to be notified of sales, special offers and voucher codes, because we want to know when new products are released, and because we think we’ll be interested in what the sender has to say.

From a marketer’s point of view, that’s a fair portion of the sale already made – it’s much easier to sell to someone who’s already told you they’re thinking about buying! So, how do you make the most of the potential for extra sales through newsletters?

It’s all about the open rate

One of the key metrics for measuring the success of a newsletter is the open rate. This is, quite simply, the proportion of your mailing list that actually opened your email. Believe it or not, there have actually been some fairly large scale studies on the effects of various different email subject lines on the open rate of newsletter-style emails. These tend to show that the shorter the subject line, the more likely the newsletter is to be opened. So the five tips for improving your newsletter open rate?

• Less is more. Keep the subject line as snappy as possible.
• You haven’t got much room to play with, so mention your special offer, promotion, or key news at the start of the subject line to grab attention.
• There isn’t room for verbose descriptions, so if you’re advertising something well known, get its name in there. If it’s not so well known, think of some vibrant descriptors to capture your potential customers’ imaginations
• Be specific. If the special offer is on a particular product, say so. If you’re running a prize draw, say what the prize is.
• Send the email from your company, not from a particular person. Strange, but true – readers will recognise the company name that they signed up to and be more likely to open the email

This is, of course, general advice. It’s always well worth testing different styles of subject header within your own newsletter mailing list – try a few different variants to figure out exactly what works for your customer base. You could even do this with the same newsletter content – split your mailing list into a couple of lists, try one subject header with one list and one with the other and see which gets the higher open rate.

Differentiate yourself

There’s a lot of competition out there, so have a think about what makes your particular products and services unique – are you the cheapest in the market? Do you have the widest range of widgets? Do you have an amazing price promise? Try to get these features into your ads to help you stand out from the crowd.

Keep it brief.

You’re limited to 25 characters for your headline, 70 for the main body of your ad, which will be split across two lines when it appears in Google, and 35 characters for a display URL (this doesn’t have to be the full destination URL if that’s too long, but it should be on the same domain and look relevant). You’re looking for snappy, concentrated little sales pitches. If you can’t say everything you want to say about a particular product in one ad…

…Create variations.

Since each ad has such limited space, you can’t expect one ad to appeal to all people or promote all aspects of your product or service. Three variations of each is a good start. This is the place to experiment with different approaches to promoting the same thing – you’ll be able to view the sales stats later on and see which is the most successful.

Keep your headlines relevant.

You’ve already identified your keyword search terms, so make sure you match your headline to the search terms within each ad group.

Include a price in the headline

People are always enticed by a strong pricepoint, so if yours looks competitive there’s a good chance you’ll get the clicks. But there is a bit more to it than that – if someone clicks on an ad with a price in it, it’s likely they’re happy to pay that price – which means you won’t be paying for clicks from people who’d rather pay less. Plus, everyone loves a discount so if you’ve got a special offer running then phrases like ‘save now’ and ‘X% off’ are a great idea.

Don’t forget your call to action!

Your ads will work better if you tell people what you want them to do, so include active phrases like ‘reserve’, ‘research, and ‘discover’. A sense of urgency helps, too, so try phrases like ‘Book now’, ‘Buy now’ and ‘Sign up today’. As Google points out, ‘find’ might be relevant but it doesn’t actively encourage a sale!

Target your links.

You’re much more likely to get conversions from your ads if they send customers directly to the most relevant page than if you send them to your homepage and expect them to rummage for the information they were after. Our general web hosting ads, for example, send people directly to the web hosting section of the website rather than pointing them at the www.daily.co.uk homepage.

Here’s a bit more from Google on creating your PPC ads

Next time, we’ll be delving into the money side of things with some thoughts on bid prices and budgeting. As ever, leave a comment or drop us a line if there’s something you’d like us to cover.

Look at all that lovely white space! We think these ads are much clearer, slicker and more focused – in other words, we think they’re a much better reflection of the no-nonsense bunch of people that we consider ourselves to be. We’ve taken out a fair bit of clutter, so it should be much easier to see what we have to offer, and we’ve drawn a bit more attention to our latest special offer and a reader offer we like to run to make it all the more relevant to the readership.

Drop us a comment to let us know what you think, and stay tuned for further creative tinkering…

All I could see was the logo and a push towards their website. Now, that makes total sense. If you have an business website, you really do need to get your domain name out there. Business cards, letterheads, advertising, company vehicles, packaging and so on should all make it really easy for your potential customers to find out more about you and get in touch by giving your domain name loud and clear. Vehicles in particular need to keep your message short, sweet and simple, because unless everyone’s wedged in accident-induced gridlock your potential customers won’t see your car or van for any longer than it takes to read your company name, trade and url.

But in the case of the car in front of me, there was not a domain name to be seen. Instead, plastered brightly across the paintwork just above the bumper, was the instruction ‘google us @ [generic phrase including the business type]‘.

It certainly caught my attention, and I did indeed google for them, but I’m not convinced that it was for quite the right reasons.

First, while it’s solid marketing theory to encourage your potential customer to action, it’s also important to make it easy. In a competitive market you’re not doing yourself any favours by saying ‘We’re somewhere in town, ask around and someone’ll tell you where.’ when your competitors are providing a map and saying ‘We’re here, come on in.’.

So, ‘google us @’ has the merit of being catchy, but ‘book an appointment at’ plus the actual url takes one step out of the process and makes it a bit clearer why they might want to visit your website. For this part of the process, it’s also really helpful if your domain name is easy to remember – avoid overly long or hyphenated domains and instead choose something as clear and snappy as you can, that reflects what customers typically call your company. www.wilkinsonplus.com might not be how you think of that particular high street shop, but the company was savvy enough to make sure they also have www.wilko.co.uk pointing to their website.

Secondly, if you’re going to make your customers search for you rather than being easy to find, you’ve got to be pretty sure that Google will return you at the head of the list. To give them their due, the company whose car I was following had clearly put the work in on the search engine optimisation front, so I found them without too much difficulty. There were a few competitors with similar names snapping at their heels, though, so maintaining that position will be a continuing effort.

If all else fails and the rest of that market gets savvier about their SEO, the company I saw is going to have to fork out some cash for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to make sure that all of their offline advertising doesn’t start driving business to their competitors instead. PPC is an incredibly efficient business-generator, but your budget will be better spent maximising that efficiency than burnt for the sake of maintaining a constant number one spot.

In summary, it’s really simple. Promote your online business every chance you get, but be smart about it. Your domain name is a huge asset so capitalise on that and get it out there. Spend your PPC budget wisely – you’re after efficient advertising rather than top-of-the-listings glory. Optimise your site for search engines so that even if potential customers don’t see your offline advertising they can still find you easily.

We’ll be giving you more tips on both PPC and search engine optimisation in the future, so if you have any questions on the subject just drop us a line and we’ll see if we can build an article around the answer.