Email marketing tip: subject line "power words"

The good folks at Campaign Monitor have crunched some numbers on the sorts of words which, when present in an email's subject line, are most likely to get that email opened.

Analyzing the behaviour of nearly 4 billion (!) recipients across 360,872 campaigns, the Campaign Monitor team reached the following conclusions:

Personalization rules - It's said that a person's favorite word is their own name and now, we have the facts to back this up. Without a doubt, subject lines that are personally addressed, do the best - just don't forget to test! 

Personal pronouns work, too - Don't have your subscribers' names handy? The popularity of "We" and "You/Your" shows that subject lines that make some kind of appeal to the reader are more likely to get a response.

Make it timely - Another trend to note is that subject lines that feature dates, or urgency seem to perform better than those that don't. Holding your subscribers to a date to act, or letting them know that you're waiting on them (with say, "Invitation") can be a very persuasive tactic.

Be exciting! Finally, we noticed while doing this research is that subject lines that end with an exclamation mark tend to result in more opens than those that don't. While we don't encourage everyone to go overboard with enthusiastic exclamations (!!), it's certainly interesting to see how a little extra energy in your subject impacts email behavior.

Email marketing is a game of percentages, and every little advantage helps. Read the full article for more details.

Big thanks to Campaign Monitor for their analysis!

(Image credit: Lousia Billeter, Creative Commons licence)

Google launches Google My Business (again)

Just when you thought you had your head around the Google Local Business directory, Google rolled it into another service, Google Places, and changed the way it worked. Then just when you thought you had your head around Google Places, Google rolled it into another service, Google Plus Local, and changed the way it worked.

Now just when you thought you had your head around Google Plus Local - you guessed it - Google has rolled it into another service and has changed the way it works.

Introducing Google My Business. 

Rich Flanagan, head of small and mid-sized businesses marketing for Google Australia, told SmartCompany Google wants to “reduce the complexity faced by small businesses when managing their presence online”.

“Through our research internally and external partners, we’ve found that small businesses are time poor and they are not necessarily marketing or digital experts,” says Flanagan. “So we want to give them a very simple tool to manage their presence online. And we wanted it to be free.”
“If you don’t have a web presence, this is probably the fastest and cheapest way to get online,” says Flanagan.
“And if you already have a website, Google My Business further enhances what you’re already doing and provides more insights for users and more ways for them to find information about your business,” he says.

As any web marketer or online business knows, managing the various heads of the Google hydra is a fulltime job. Google Maps locations, Google Youtube videos, Google Plus profiles, starred customer reviews, it's a mess. 

Is Google My Business the answer? The only sensible answer is "wait and see". Google is chronically bad at interacting with businesses that aren't Google Adwords advertisers; Google doesn't know whether to treat them as customers, as partners, as data sources, or as inventory. And if your business already has a Google Plus Page - the thing that last year Google was excitedly claiming that every small business needed to be found online - it is as yet completely unclear how that will interact with the new Google My Business. Stay tuned.

Is Facebook headed for a crash?

Princeton researchers forecast that Facebook will lose 80% of its peak user base within the next three years.

Facebook has spread like an infectious disease but we are slowly becoming immune to its attractions, and the platform will be largely abandoned by 2017, say researchers at Princeton University.

The forecast of Facebook's impending doom was made by comparing the growth curve of epidemics to those of online social networks. Scientists argue that, like bubonic plague, Facebook will eventually die out.

The social network, which celebrates its 10th birthday on 4 February, has survived longer than rivals such as Myspace and Bebo, but the Princeton forecast says it will lose 80% of its peak user base within the next three years.

A scary thought if you've put all your online marketing eggs into Facebook's basket. Read more.

Happy New Year!

A very Happy New Year goes out to all our wonderful clients, partners, and suppliers. We've achieved some wonderful things together in 2013, our best year yet. We look forward to serving you and working with you in 2014!

-- Kelly