A Psychological Based Analysis of Marketing Email Subject Lines 

A Psychological Based Analysis of Marketing Email Subject Lines 

Since its inception in the early 1960s, email has gone on to radically transform our lives. As the technology has become more accessible, marketers have embraced the ability to directly communicate with their consumers, sending messages directly to the smartphone in their pockets. With this capacity, it’s easy to see why email marketing has become invaluable to businesses around the world.  

Email marketing could be classified as any email a business sends to a current or potential customer in which they send advertising material, request business, or solicit sales and donations. More recent marketing strategies have sent communications with the aim of building brand awareness, trust or loyalty. Email marketing has become so popular with businesses for a number of reasons. It is much cheaper than sending traditional mail and can appear almost instantly in front of their consumer. There are also more opportunities to gather analytics from emails. Marketers can analyse who opened their emails, when they opened them, which links they did or didn’t click and use this information to optimize their future messaging. Partnered with an effective marketing and sales funnel, email has become a powerful tool for businesses. 

To achieve any success with Email Marketing, you first need to persuade the reader to open the email. The main deciding factor in a reader’s choice, to open or delete, will be the subject line.  

At present, there has been little scientific research into what triggers a person into opening and reading an email. A recent study however used natural language processing, text analysis and computational linguistics to identify what these triggers were. The research analysed the email subject lines from a psychological point of view and determined what effect it would have on a person reading it and what decisions they would make to open that email or neglect it. The objective of the research was to develop methods that could quantify the psychological effects induced by an email subject line; and correlated this with the action performed by the email receiver.

To conduct the study the researchers used sentiment analysis and data mining on three large data sets from Enron Email, Spamdex Digital Spam Archive and Google Open Adwords. The study concluded that for a subject line to be successful it would need to follow a series of rules. These rules stated there were a series of elements that would contribute to the success or failure of an email. 

Emotion

One of the key factors was determined to be the emotion conveyed within the subject line. Unsurprisingly it was found that a subject line with a positive emotion word received more opens, while a negative emotion word received fewer opens. The study also looked at blending emotions within the subject line. It found that a mixture of joy, surprise, anticipation and trust could create an increase in opens, were as a blend of sad, fearful or angry emotions would result in fewer opens. Perhaps surprisingly it was found that blending negative emotions with surprise or anticipation could generate an increase in responses/replies to the original email. 

Polarity

Another factor found to contributed to the success of an email subject line was the use of polarity. The use of positive polarities such as “is” or “have:” were found to have a much better open rather when compared with negative polarities like “is not” or “have not”  

Phrasing

There are many opinions on the length and theme of phrasing to use in a subject line. This piece of research found that if a subject line is more subjective or personal to a reader it is more likely to hold their attention for longer. Including the name of your business, organisation or brand were also found to include open rates. Interestingly the research also found that starting an email with an adjective such as “many” “few” or “fast” would limit the number of clicks an email received. 

In terms of length, the study found that if the subject line had less than three phrases It would not generate a high level of clicks. The study also looked at some of the terms and related words that would affect the success of an email. It found that those containing business-related terms performed better than those that included terms relating to entertainment or travelling. 

Sometimes however the terms used for the same subject could achieve very different results. If we look at the term “Shopping” then including words like “% off” “sale” or including prices and discounts would result in a higher open rate. In contrast terms like “free” or “coupon” were found to limit the open rate. Looking at business terms, words like “turnover” or “millions” would have a much better impact on readers than words like “webinar”, “seminar” or “conference. ”

Words & Characters 

When looking into the number of words a subject line should use the study concluded that a subject line with between 7 and 8 words would get the most opens. Luckily for times when it’s not possible to have that many, the study also found that using more than 4 words would also draw a favourable number of clicks. It also found that the use of longer words, capitalising the first letter and separating the subject line with pipes (*-*-*-) would also generate a higher number of clicks. 

The study also drilled down into the number of characters to use within an email subject line. It found that having more than 80 characters was favourable. In comparison using between 50 to 80 characters would generate less click and using less than 15 would generate even fewer. 

From the research, we can see that there are many factors to consider when crafting your email subject line. It is important to remember it’s not possible to follow each finding that this study concluded would bring a higher rate of clicks. For example, it would be difficult to construct a subject line of 80 characters and 7 words! Their findings however can serve as a guideline for marketers when next selecting what to put in that all-important subject heading. 

Should your demand generation go on a summer holiday?

Generating demand for B2B businesses in the summer months

As the summer sun shines down on us and a rediscovered sense of freedom prevails, we have been asked by our customers – “what form of marketing is going to be effective this summer as everyone tries to make the best of the sunshine and fulfilling their pent-up craving for a holiday?” Should our demand generation activities go on holiday as well?

Based on 15 years of experience running successful B2B demand generation programs for B2B technology and software businesses, here are few suggestions on how sales and marketing teams can build their pipeline and generate demand during these summer months.

Time To Collect Data

Data collected by the most used B2B marketing platform, LinkedIn, suggests that social engagement and interaction increases over the summer as people find more time to engage with interesting content. The keyword being “interesting content”. While your prospects will habitually scroll their phones, even on break, they probably won’t read a 20-page whitepaper. So here’s the first tip – make your content marketing interesting and lighter to read. It’s time to invest in multimedia assets – videos, gif’s, infographics, quizzes and puzzles. Gamification of content is a great way to engage your prospects while they are basking in the sun.

Pick Your Moment

Timing and relevance are key – sending out a webinar invite on a Friday evening before a long weekend is a bad idea. Whereas sending an email on the Tuesday following a bank holiday with a subject line – “Wish You Were Still on Holiday” or “How to get 2 Hours of Your Day Back to Enjoy The Sun” will get you a higher open rate and better responses.

We’ve found that many companies use the traditionally quiet summer holiday period to plan projects and scope solutions. Engaging customers at this stage of the sales lifecycle gives you a better chance to work together later. Create and share content that helps people in their research such as savings calculators, build your own business case templates, case studies and use cases. Making the effort to provide relevant content now, can work in your favour when the prospect reaches a decision point.

Make use of the less hectic schedule

If you have run outbound calling campaigns you will know from experience that you can get more appointments in the summer months and kick start conversations. This could vary for different industry sectors, however, we have seen that summer months are ideal to start conversations with clients. This is an ideal time to get involved and approach key personnel with new products and services. People are still evaluating solutions and building a qualified pipeline will ensure your sales team have a great pool of leads to close in the autumn.

Leverage the power of data

Your marketing campaigns are only as effective as your database. Use this time to build your marketing lists and expand your subscriber database.  Spend time with your sales team to segment the database into personas so you can personalise the messages that you send to various segments of data. Personalisation can deliver 5x-8x the ROI but 85% of marketers surveyed say their audience segments are too broad.

Monitor response data to campaigns closely and refocus and tweak campaigns to suit target audience needs.  Focus on sectors or personas where you are getting better engagement.

Make exceptions

If you target industries that shut down in the summer such as the education sector, mark them in your exclusion lists so they don’t affect your engagement rates are part of a larger dataset.

Put your B2B demand generation on autopilot

Last but not the least, don’t forget to take a break yourself and while you do that, demand generation doesn’t need to stop. Making use of marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot makes it easier to put your marketing programs on auto-pilot while you are away. Just a word of caution automation requires planning to ensure you get the right message to the right person at the right time. Whether you are running Google ads, LinkedIn ads or email campaigns, HubSpot or similar marketing automation tools, ensure your database is clean and clearly segmented and marketing workflows defined based on your prospect behaviour.

Predictable Marketing manages global demand generation campaigns for software and technology firms and we are busiest in the summer months and the latter half of the year. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss your summer strategy for demand generation and other marketing activities.

How Should Sales Treat a Lead Generated From Digital Marketing?

Within business, there is always a contrast between the way sales and marketing interact with potential customers. Marketing prefers to nurture new customers, where sales are eager to close a deal and move on to the next consumer. In recent times however, we have seen that a hard-selling tactic is no longer effective as our buying habits have evolved. We no longer like being followed by a salesperson (instore or virtually) and like to research and make our own decisions. This makes lead generation and conversion different from what it used to be, with a wealth of competitors and knowledge on the market, consumers have more choice than ever whilst businesses must work twice as hard to be seen and to transform potential leads into paying customers.

There will then inevitably be a difference in opinion as to how salespeople and marketing people would want to treat incoming leads.

What is a Lead?

Contrary to what some might think a lead, cannot be considered the first stage of inbound marketing. Lead generation falls within the second stage of inbound marketing. Once you have attracted an audience for your product you can now work on converting them into a lead for the sales team.

It is also important to note the difference between a sales qualified lead and a marketing qualified lead, as both will have different needs and expectations. A sales qualified lead is a customer who has already expressed a firm desire to purchase your product, they will need little or no further encouragement before making their buying decision. A marketing qualified lead, however, is a customer who although engaged by your marketing efforts, is not yet ready to move to a paying customer. They must therefore be nurtured by marketing and sales with the purpose of moving them to become a paying customer.

Qualifying The Lead & Lead Scoring.

Before you go to the effort of moving a customer through a marketing and sales funnel, it is important to qualify if the interest is valid. Are they interested in your product, are they a competitor or potentially just spam?  There are several questions you can ask your lead to qualify their interest.  You can reach out to customers directly, to qualify their interest and support the prospects research with some more information or content from your marketing, e.g. a case study. If you are struggling to know where to start with the questions, you can start by asking;

• What were they looking for when they found your company?
• Why were they researching this?
• Is this a part of an active project?
• What is the company’s budget?
• Why the need for your product arose?
• Who makes the buying decisions within the company?
• What their expectation are for a buying and implementation timeframe?

Once you have more data on the lead you can give them a corresponding score to denote how hot this lead is. Scoring the lead like this will allow your sales teams to use their time more effectively, focusing on the leads that are likely to generate sales.

Don’t Make The Lead Wait

Leads, once qualified, need to be nurtured straight away. The level of interest from your potential customer is dropping with every minute you wait to respond, and they may already be looking at competing products. It is therefore important for a sales team to have an internal routine for handling incoming leads, with the aim of getting positive responses within 24 hours of receiving a lead.

Direct leads into a mailbox can be missed, forgotten, or not attended to due to the demands on a sales team’s time. Many businesses are seeing the benefits of leading customers to a department-wide email address that can be monitored by the whole team, or by investing in an automated calendar booking system.  Having an effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system such as HubSpot, which ties both sales and marketing activities, becomes critical for logging interactions with customers to ensure your whole team are all aware of where they are on their sale’s journey.

Offering Information

Many of the leads picked up through marketing will not yet be ready to take the leap to be a customer. They will need more information on your product and how it solves the issues they are facing or how it opens up an opportunity for them. One of the best ways to convey this information is through webinars. Webinars are a low-cost way to showcase your product and its key features in front of your target audience. You also guarantee your audience is engaged by the fact they had to register and log in to attend.  You can also measure engagement throughout the webinar to see if any factors such as ease of entry, the topic, or length of the webinar can be refined for next time.

There are many other marketing materials you can use to inform customers. Whitepapers, blogs, instructional videos and Q&A questions all work well to fill in the gaps potential customers might have about your product.  Often the information will not just be for the lead, but others within the company they need to convince to make a buying decision.

Offer an Incentive

Offering an incentive is a great way to secure the “yes” that converts a lead into a customer. It can be telling if you are failing to grow leads that your product or offering might not be tempting enough. Offers can remain flexible and can be changed to suit the customers need, in fact, the more tailored and exclusive an offer feels the more desirable it becomes to a customer.  If you do not have the flexibility to create an offer, free trials of your product also work to effectively entice a customer. By trying your product they get to see it effectively solving the problem they faced and will be completed to purchase when faced with the prospect of losing it.

Crunch Time

At the end of the sales journey, your customer will reach their decision. They will either buy from you or not. It is important for a sales team to not be scared to ask for a sale. It might seem strange to say but many sales teams will not just simply ask their leads if they are ready to buy. Your leads became leads because they are interested in your product and what it offers. If you are not prepared to ask for the sale your competitors will.

There are many tricks and techniques sales teams might employ when closing a sale, but many of these techniques could now seem outdated, especially nowadays with the rise in inbound sales. If you have effectively engaged with your customer to discover their needs and successfully communicated how your product can affordably satisfy their needs, then there should be no barrier to closing the sale.

Asking for a sale will also stop you from wasting time with cold leads. Setting a time limit on communications is a terrific way to apply soft pressure to a potential customer and allows you to help your sales and marketing funnels up to date with engaged customers and not wasting time or effort chasing a dead lead.

Working With Cognism

Every successful campaign has accurate data behind it.

The purchased list approach is a thing of the past because 2% of the data in a static list is invalid even before you import it into your marketing platform.

Cognism work to make prospecting smarter. They produce fresh, accurate and verified data for potential customers for businesses to target. Through a network of international resources, their data covers over 400 million business profiles, from small and independent businesses to global enterprise, whilst keeping in line with GDPR regulations.

Neetika Khanna, Founder and Chief Marketing Consultant of Predictable Marketing said “We are looking forward to this partnership and are positive that it  will provide the horsepower of accurate data for our client campaigns and amplify results we get from it”.

How A Successful Marketing Strategy Can Accelerate Buying Decisions For Technology Consumers

In the race to market and sell the latest technologies, Predictable Marketing has established that it’s not how much you say, but how effectively you can target key customers with relevant and clear messaging that will generate genuine leads and close a deal.

When purchasing technology, outside of renewing a service or subscription, customers are selecting something they hope will ultimately change an aspect of their personal or working life for the better. It therefore makes sense that your customers will seek to inform themselves before buying. This creates an opportunity for tech companies, to help their customers in their research by providing relevant, helpful content.

Many companies over-create content, to cover as many bases as possible. This approach however leaves sales teams and customers confused or the content too focused on the products, solutions or services and not providing the answers the customer is seeking. It is essential to create a content plan that takes the customer through the journey of awareness, research, building trust and making a buying decision.

Start by creating a profile of your existing customers and those you wish to target, diving into their needs for your product, level of understanding and what implication purchasing from you might bring. At Predictable Marketing, we encourage our customers to actually print out pictures of their target personas and define their personalities. From here they can then create content with these customers in mind. Review your content from this customers perspective and approve the content only if you feel it would add value to this prospect.

Establishing A Need

The first step is to create a creating a profile of potential or existing customers based on what they might be looking to achieve. The first question to explore is why people should implement a new technology? There are many reasons potential customers are looking at new technology; they might believe it will make their workflow easier, save them money, improve customer experience, meet compliance objective, grow their business without increasing costs or beating competition.

An example of this can be seen in the number of companies that are investing in automated processes to save their workforce time which can be better spend within the business. Knowing your customer’s needs and expectations can then help you select what aspects of your technology you want to highlight first to drive interest.  Your marketing at this stage should resonate with the needs of your customer or their business, showing them how your software offers a solution to the problem they have highlighted. You can get this message across most effectively with infographics or a short demonstrational video.

Further Research

Once the need for change has been highlighted, potential customers will now research the options available to them. A marketing team must focus on which unique selling points are going to appeal to which customer profile and what platform to use to reach them. If a customer can’t find this key information it will trigger a knock-on delay in a purchase or result in them looking to another supplier.

This is where a marketing team needs to have materials ready that will best help consumers understand your product. Through the use of informative content like whitepapers, datasheets and demos customers can get a real feeling for your product and what it brings to the market.  After researching and accepting the need for change, your customer is now ready to practically think about how the change will be executed. At this point, when the customer is thinking about how they can implement a new technology, your marketing can move to its next stage, starting to talk about the pricing options and levels of support available.

Making a Decision 

Now that you have a very engaged lead you can work to bring the sale over the line. Customers will make the final decision based on the credibility and trust you have built up with them, and that you have built up with previous customers. This is where you produce materials that demonstrate previous success stories, these can include testimonials, business case studies.

Interactive demonstrations of your product, such as in webinars and workshops, are also good to give customers a hands-on experience of your software and answer any remaining questions. Many times, your customer will now be working to convince their bosses or stakeholders to invest within your software. It is therefore important that you make yourself easy to contact to field any questions they might come back to you with or to provide support to build a business care for other stakeholders in the company. Marketing can help by creating easy to use contact forms and chat functions on your website and through emailing and engaging regularly with a client.

Start Now

Once you have planned your customer’s journey and created content for each stage it’s time to sit down and relax…..not!  This is where the optimisation process begins. Marketers should continuously monitor feedback in terms of engagement rates and responses to calls to actions and make changes based on the data collected throughout the customer journey. For example, if you can see most visitors drop off at your landing page it’s time to make some changes to it!

Your new campaigns and content must focus on; presenting and addressing the need customer have expressed an interest in. The language of your campaign is also key to selling your technology, too technical and you will confuse buyers but too simple and you will undersell yourself and your product.

Once you have a content piece that connects with customers and you are getting the responses you want, consider scaling assets.  This involves creating similar pieces of content with differing variations for social channels or addressing different audience personas. This ability to have similar materials within a campaign is essential to marketing each unique selling point effectively across multiple channels.

Armed with a new sales strategy, back up with a solid marketing campaign, you can now enact your plans and target new customers, achieving greater results. Remember however to update plans, rework content and not be afraid to delete elements as your technology and its customers evolve. This process of re-focusing your marketing and sales plans will be time-consuming initial but it will soon pay dividends as you develop a deeper understanding of your customer’s behaviours.

If you would like to talk more about how an effective marketing strategy could help accelerate your customer’s buying decision, please get in touch.