The open rate of your email message is nearly 100% dependent upon your subject line. Your potential customers typically spend less than two seconds deciding if they want to read your message. Which means that you have to use compelling subject lines to be a successful email marketer.
Here are 12 tips for creating better subject lines:
1. Communicate fast, just like on an outer envelope. Use 40- 50 characters or less.
2. Mention your primary benefit in the subject line. You must motivate the reader to read your note now.
3. Build your subject line around your desired action. If you're selling a webinar, include date/subject/registration in subject line. If you're selling product, include price savings in the subject line.
4. Write your subject lines first, then create your email marketing message to complement the subject line. The number one mistake of most email marketers is a last-minute subject line.
5. Only use personalization in subject line if you already have a business relationship with the recipients of your email message.
6. Give urgent reason to act now. Examples include "order by x date", "offer ends tomorrow at 6 pm", "registration deadline is today".
7. Be specific. Use phrase such as "Get up to 80% off" rather than "Save money".
8. You can use the word "free" with caution by following these guidelines:
* Don't make "free" the first word in your subject line.
* Don't use exclamation point such as Free!
* Don't spell out FREE in all caps
9. If use the word "complimentary" instead of "free", make sure it's spelled correctly. Many email marketers incorrectly use the word "complementary", which has a completely different meaning.
10. Test your subject lines continuously to find the winner for you. Make sure to send each version of subject line to at least 5000 email addresses.
11. Look at newspaper headlines and magazine covers for ideas on how to express ideas quickly with great appeal.
12. Use software to check the spam score of your subject line and body copy prior to sending email message. Then make changes as needed.
Contactology has free software tool which allows you to quickly determine a message's quality and deliverability.
Learn more about creating more effective email subject lines from these sources:
*
Email Marketing Resources from Lyris *
3 Ways to Write Better Subject Lines*
"All About Creative" book from Direc MarketingIQ
I recently purchased new business cards from Vistaprint, a leading online marketer which provides full color printing of marketing promotional materials.
I am very pleased with the new card, and with the pricing.
But as a veteran direct mail marketer, I'm even more impressed by Vistaprint's ability to upsell and cross-sell at every step of the order process. As I moved through the design and order steps, Vistaprint gave me the opportunity to buy a dozen additional items featuring my company's logo. Each of these items showed how our logo would look, and offered special pricing.
Anyone who's involved with direct marketing -- or any type of online marketing -- should order something from Vistaprint to see how easy it can be to add incremental sales from your website.
Some people may be turned off by Vistaprint's aggressive marketing, but it obviously works. According to information on their mailing list datacards, Vistaprint is selling each month to approximately 50,000 business customers and approximately 150,000 consumer customers.
Check out the new Hippo Direct YouTube Channel which will feature short videos related to mailing lists, email lists, direct marketing, and online marketing tactics.
And sometimes we'll just have silly videos to give you a laugh.
You can bookmark the Hippo Direct YouTube channel at
http://www.youtube.com/user/HippoDirect
The best way to improve results from email marketing 
is to improve the appeal and responsiveness of your
subject lines. Better subject lines immediately lead to
higher open rates, which will increase the number of
people who click through to your website.
In my work as a list broker I see every day that the companies which have the most success with email marketing continually seek to improve their subject lines. The companies who give little attention to subject lines continue to struggle with their emailings.
Here are 10 tips which you can begin to use with your next email marketing campaign. These tips can be used for emailings to both consumer and business markets.
10. Include an emotional or wishful benefit such as "Take a few days off to grow your business."
9. Include name of company whose product or service is being promoted in the message.
8. Use personalization by first name only if you have a relationship with the recipient.
7. Use "your" or "you" to increase relevance to the reader.
These 6 below are from Lisa Sparks of Constant Contact and her excellent article "6 Tips for Better Subject Lines: Get your emails opened with attention-grabbing taglines"
6. Test your subject lines
5. Think of your subject line as a tweet.
4. Encourage action
3. Get inspired
2. Include numbers
1. List your audience's hot topics
Kipp Bodnar from HubSpot posted an excellent blog 
called "27 Marketing Lessons B2B Marketers Should
Know". His posting describes the top marketing ideas
from this week's MarketingProfs B2B Forum.
My 7 favorite marketing tips are:
1. Make sure that you focus on using your company's most important keywords in your social media status updates.
2. Create as much content as possible and repackage across multiple mediums such as blog posts, podcasts and webinars to increase lead generation.
3. In the current Web 2.0 environment, Marketing = Publishing.
4. When doing email marketing, have a clear reason why you're testing specific elements of the email campaign.
5. Kipp says that 20% of searches done in Google every day have never been done before. Which means that you should continue creating content which is relevant to your business so that next week's searchers can find you.
6. Mobile marketing, which is sometimes called SMS or text message marketing, is becoming an important B2B marketing method.
7. The primary purpose of social media content isn't to provide something for people to read. Instead, it's to provide something which leads to new thinking or new discussions.
I've found a great email marketing terms glossary from EliteEmail. Anyone who uses email lists or who is involved with online marketing should check out this site for definitions and useful tips.
For example, according to EliteEmail, "almost all web browsers and email software are capable of displaying four primary fonts properly: Verdana, Times, Arial, and Helvetica, including their variants (Arial Narrow, Times New Roman, etc.) If a web developer or email marketer decides to use a different font he or she risks compatibility problems and the potential that their pages/emails may render inaccurately when viewed by these people."
You can find easy-to-understand definitions for all of these email marketing terms at the email glossary page
* A/B Split
* Above-The-Fold
* ASP
* Auto Reply
* Auto Responder
* B2B
* B2C
* Bandwidth
* Blacklist
* Bounce (Hard)
* Bounce (Soft)
* Call To Action
* Campaign
* Can-Spam Act of 2003
* CAPTCHA
* Challenge Response
* Click-Through Rate (CTR)
* Content
* Conversion Rate
* Cost Per Thousand (CPM)
* Database
* Dedupe
* Domain Key / DKIM
* Double Opt-In
* Email Blocking
* Email Client
* Email Newsletter
* Email Service Provider
* eZine
* False Positive
* Font
* From/Sender Address
* From/Sender Name
* Harvesting
* Header
* HTML Email
* IP Address
* ISP
* Landing Page
* Links
* Load Time
* Mailing List
* Multi-Part MIME Email
* Open Rate
* Open Relay
* Opt-In Subscriber
* Opt-Out List
* Opt-Out Subscriber
* Permission Based Email
* Personalization
* Phishing
* Preview Pane
* Privacy Policy
* Rental List
* Segmentation
* Signature
* Single Opt-In
* Spam / UCE
* Spam Trap
* SPF Record
* Spoofing
* Subject Line
* Targeting
* Unique Selling Proposition
* Unsubscribe
* URL
* Viral Marketing
* Web-Friendly Fonts
* Whitelist
Here's a behind-the-scenes peek at the strategies which Hippo Direct is using to grow our business, and increase sales for our clients. The graphic below shows the Hippo Direct Content Wheel.
The underlying idea is to write original articles and other useful content, then share and publish variations of this content for different market segments. All of the spokes to the right of center represent places in which we distribute our content:
- Blog
- Websites
- Email Newsletters
- Promotional Emails
The spokes to left of center are channels from which the vast world of internet users and prospective clients can access and share our content:
- Links From Others
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
This Content Wheel plan can be used by any business with a website and blog to dramatically increase the reach and results of their marketing program. It combines inbound marketing and social media with direct marketing and email marketing.
Direct Magazine online recently featured an article by
Stefan Pollard called "
Three Vital Elements of E-mail to Test".
In this article Stefan explains in simple terms how and why to test these elements of an email message:
1. Audience segmentation -- do A/B splits on variables such as customer vs. prospect; or what type of product purchased.
2. Subject line -- test brand-specific vs. action-oriented vs. benefit-driven subject lines.
3. Call to action -- test the action which you want reader to take; the words you use to describe the action; the way the call to action looks (fonts, image, location)
I'll add two more key elements where testing has improved the results from email marketing campaigns for clients of Hippo Direct:
1. Transmission time -- can test both the time of day and day of week. Most marketers get the best response with either a 10 am or 11 am Eastern transmit time on Tuesday thru Thursday. But I know of technology-related marketers who get their best response with a 3 am Eastern transmit time; and marketers to Europe who email at 6 am Eastern time, which is 10 am London time.
2. Graphic images used in message -- can test messages with and without image. When photos of people are used, test pictures which feature various combinations of age, gender and ethnicity. In many cases, the choice of photo is made by a designer at an advertising agency. The smart marketer will always test various photos to determine which one is best for their target audience.
An email marketing strategy which re-sent promotions to non-openers of the original offer increased overall click thru rates by 49% for one of Hippo Direct's publishing clients.
This email marketing tactic is featured in a new report from MarketingSherpa called "Marketing Wisdom for 2010: 70 Marketers and Agencies Share Real-Life Stories and Lessons Learned".
For more information and to download the report, visit MarketingSherpa's website. See the Hippo Direct citation on pages 11 and 12 of the report.
The increase in overall click through rate was achieved as part of an ongoing email marketing program to sell paid publication subscriptions to registrants of a free online service.
I recently spent a week with family on a Caribbean cruise. During our port visits, part of each day included a stroll through the town's main shopping district. 
I had vowed not to think of work during this vacation, but as I passed so many stores with the same merchandise, the marketing part of my brain kicked in with a few questions:
* Why are some of these stores more crowded than others?
* How do these places stay in business when so few who visit buy anything?
Then I started thinking of how similar a busy street filled with tourists is compared to the busy internet filled with searchers.
Here are some observations on how we can all improve the sales results from our retail store or our website:
Make sure lots of traffic is flowing by on daily basis.
Store: Cruise ships deliver 10,000 or more potential buyers per day to places such as St. Thomas, San Juan, and Nassau.
Website: Google processes 2 billion search requests per day. In each one of these requests the user is seeking something via keywords typed into text box.
Become a destination location.
Store: We visited several specific art and jewelry stores because we had been given coupons with chance to win a free gift.
Website: Get referrals to your website via blogs, social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, plus links from other websites.
Stand out from the crowd to get people in the door.
Store: Best examples which I saw included: eye-catching window displays; compelling store employee in street saying intriguing phrases loaded with marketing keywords; juggler; energetic music; air conditioning blasting through the front door of store; free shots of rum; samples of fresh made candy.
Website: What do people buy from you? What do you do better than other companies?
Give incentive to start relationship then move toward bigger sale.
Store: Sales associate begins friendly chat with store visitor, then introduces the most qualified buyers to store manager who can close the big sales.
Website: Give something of value free as incentive for online registration.