Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

We reached the point where we were growing an email list bigger and bigger and bigger with no real end game in sight.

What did we plan to do with all these email addresses once we had them?

Good question.

We didn’t have an answer, so we stopped trying to add more.

We had lots of different ideas, and people have been so gracious to share their thoughts on what we could be doing (I’d love to hear from you in the comments, too, if anything comes to mind).

Here’re a few suggestions we thought over...

Three million campaigns sent, we've handpicked our favorites

Correct positioning of your key messages in your email marketing campaigns can help them get noticed and remembered. But what's the correct position?

Have you ever jotted down your grocery list and driven to the store only to realize you’ve forgotten it? Have you then tried to recall the items on your list? Chances are, you remembered the first items on the list, the last items on the list, or a combination of the two.

What you forgot, on the other hand, were the items in the middle. This is due to the serial position effect.

To summarize, the study found that when you are presented with a piece of content, in this case a list of words, you are more likely to remember the first words (the primary effect) and last words (the recency effect)....

So what makes you want to take that extra step to actually open an email? Often, it's the subject line. After all, it's your very first impression of the email -- and from it, you'll do your best to judge the content on the inside.

I always ask myself one question before opening an email: Will opening this email be a waste of time? Typically, the answer to this question is based entirely on the effectiveness of the subject line. Granted, there are other elements of an email that make me want to open it -- a familiar sender name, for example -- but 9 times out of 10, the subject line is the determining factor....