Fifty characters could be all that stands between you and success in your next email campaign.  Why?  Because fifty characters is all the space you have in a typical subject line to catch your reader’s eye and entice him/her to open your email and take the action you want.

How could something so small make or break an email’s success?  Because so many recipients use the subject line to decide whether to open or delete an email. 

This makes subject lines tricky little devils to write.  Today and tomorrow, I’ll explore 10 rules for crafting a good one.  Today, the first 5…

1.  READ THE NEWSPAPER:  If you want to write a better subject line, pick up your local paper.  The headline usually highlights a story’s most important fact in a limited space.  A subject line, as well, should clearly state what your reader can expect from your email, what’s in it for them or what you want them to do.

2.  THERE IS NO SURE-FIRE FORMULA:  What works in one campaign might bomb with the next.  A discount offer should be worded differently from an upsell, and both are different from a “breaking news” announcement.

3.  SUPPORT THE “FROM” LINE:  The “from” line tells the recipient who sent the email, and the subject lien sells the recipient on opening.  If your “from” line lists your company name, you don’t have to repeat it in the subject line, which frees up space.  Do consider branding your subject line with the name of the newsletter so that it will stand out in your recipients’ overflowing inboxes.

4.  LIST KEY INFO FIRST:  Some email clients allow more characters in a subject line than others, but most give you at least 50, including spaces.  So, load your key information in that first 50.  Also, make sure the cut-off doesn’t occur in a crucial word, such as a price or a date.  Test the email and send it to yourself with the proposed subject line to see what it looks like.

5.  PERSONALIZE:  Personalize subject lines based on users’ product or content preferences, interests, past purchases, web visits, or links clicked.  Be careful when personalizing on past purchases, however, because the purchase could have been a gift for someone else and may not relate to your reader’s real interests.  Always make it easy for your audience to find and update their data and preferences. 

ALIGN METRICS WITH GOALS AND BUSINESS STRATEGY:  If you intend to compete in your market based on high-touch service and you’re running your contact center based exclusively on throughput metrics, there’s a clear misalignment that will defeat corporate intent. 

• Consider metrics such as “the number of issues covered in an interaction,” instead of “average call handle time” or “calls handled per hour” if your goal is to develop deeper customer relationships.
• Sales-related metrics are more suitable if your goal includes revenue generation.  Compliance conformance may be more important than handle time if you are in a highly regulated industry.
• Have a great looking, customizable storefront.  Set your web store apart by creating your own individual look and an easily navigate-able store layout.  Layouts and order forms shoudl be easy to change and customize.
• Make payment easy.  Use integrated real-time credit card processing with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) compliance and multi-level fraud protection for your customers’ safety and purchasing comfort. 
• Maintain ONE view of the customer… regardless of which channel he/she has purchased through:  retail, catalog, telesales or the Internet.

It’s all about your customers, your research, your product development, and your marketing efforts entertwined to make for a superior customer experience.  You want more customers to buy more products so it’s important to make them feel comfortable doing business with you.  Finally, it’s key to find a way to keep your channels highly productive and focused and to have the ability to interact with each customer at the most opportune time to increase your share of wallet, products per customer, cross-sell, and up-sell… all while stimulating the emotions for loyalty and retention.

EMPOWER YOUR AGENTS AND CUSTOMERS WITH KNOWLEDGE:  Contact center agents struggle to keep up with their companies’ offerings due to increased product proliferation and business consolidation.  Ever-changing processes and government regulations add to this challenge.  Businesses must arm agents with knowledge guided interactive processes that are flexible and help them improve first contact resolution.

• Provide flexible access methods such as dynamic FAQs, search, browse, guided interactions, and chatbot interfaces to maximize user adoption and ROI.  A broad set of access methods makes it easy for agents and customers to find information based on their own preferences, experience level, problem type, and stage in the customer lifecycle.  All the while, these methods also reduce escalations and improve agent and customer experience.
• Do not ignore ongoing content maintenance.  Automating content performance management tasks will help sustain content relevance, while increasing customer knowledge and encouraging self service. 

IT’S OURSPACE:  Adoption of electronic channels continues to increase, fueled by increased usage of the Internet and generational preferences.  Moreover, many industry studies over the years have shown that interaction costs through these channels are significantly lower than the phone channel.  It makes sense to leverage online channels as part of a unified customer interaction hub, while driving down costs.

• Implement a customer interaction core to avoid creating channel silos and provide a unified and consistent customer (brand) experience.  Start with the most important channels first and simply plug in other channels when you are ready for them.
• Make sure traditional channels like phone and face-to-face interactions are integrated with your other e-channels.  Look for solutions with proven, out-of-the-box integration.
• Establish and track service levels that are appropriate for each channel.

Customer service has emerged as one of the few sustainable differentiators in today’s hyper-competitive markets. The companies winning in this environment are those who provide “standout” customer service, while controlling costs.  Let’s start this series with some innovations and best practices:

1.  TAKE A PROACTIVE APPROACH TO CUSTOMER SERVICE:  With “time to competitive advantage” shrinking, businesses no longer have the luxury of taking a wait and see approach to customer service matters… whether it’s reacting to customer trends or competitor moves in the target markets, adding and unifying interaction channels, or addressing issues before inbound customer queries start to pile up.  First-mover advantage in building exceptional customer experience and brand equity is often sustainable and irreversible. 

• Add next-generation web self-service options as well as channels such as chat, SMS, and co-browse and make sure they are integrated seamlessly into your user interface.
• Define customer value, based on strategic variables such as customer lifetime value or tactical factors such as the value of goods in an online shopping cart or a combination of both.
• Make sure your customer interaction management system is able to integrate easily with ERP, CRM, and e-commerce systems.