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Slide 1 – Intro
Thank you for joining us today for our monthly Qebot Coffee Break – This is a 15 minute, hyper focused webinar series aimed at providing quick, easy to consume marketing and business operations tips to help you run your business more effectively. Today’s Coffee Break will focus on optimizing subject lines for your email marketing campaigns to drive more opens.

Slide 2 – Host
My name is Matthew White, CEO of Qebot, and I’ll be your host for today. Qebot consolidates the tools and applications that small and local businesses use to manage their marketing and day-to-day operations into a single portal, decreasing time, effort, and resources necessary to build your business.

Slide 3 – How to Interact with today’s webinar
Today’s webinar is being run through Go-To-Webinar. Please use the question feature as shown on the screen to ask questions throughout the presentation. To keep our webinar on schedule, we’ll answer the most pertinent questions at the end of the webinar. Question and Answer will be limited to only 3 minutes, so if we do not get to your question, please email us at success@qebot.com, and we’ll respond to you directly. All attendees will receive a link to the recording of this webinar for reference.

Slide 4 – Overview
Todays webinar progress as shown – Use cases, subject line best practices, subject line do not’s, statistics, an example, and our Q&A and wrap up.

Slide 5 – Use Cases
Here are a few ways that you can use email marketing to engage with your customers:

Slide 6 – Newsletter
Newsletters are a great way for your to keep in regular contact with your clients, and keep your business on top of mind. It also works very well to keep them updated with any changes, updates, new products or services, or pertinent news you may want to share. Include a few interest pieces about your industry that link to your blog to really show that you are an expert.

Slide 7 – Promotions
Do you send out promotions or coupons to your clients to keep them coming back? There is no better way to do that than through email.

Slide 8 – Updates
Let your loyal customers know if there are updates to your business, products, or services that they should know about.

Slide 9 – Events
Events are a great way to get to know your customers and local community. If you have regular events at or for your business, remind your customers about them through and email campaign.

Slide 10 – Subject Line Best Practices
Now that you have an idea about how businesses are using email marketing, and perhaps some ideas of your own, let’s talk about how to draft email marketing subject lines that drive opens, and get people reading your content.

Slide 11 – Keep it Short and Simple
The more concise, the better. Try to convey your message, and get across what you want your reader to know what he or she will get out of this content in 3-7 words. More than that typically get ignored, or often times, will be cut off by the email platform your customer is using.

Slide 12 – Personalize it
This is an interesting one. A few years ago everyone was talking about using your recipient name in the campaign to make it directed towards them. Data is showing as of late, however, that most users these days are pretty aware of how email marketing technology works, and that people are realizing that having their name in an email subject line is a basic option for most marketing technology these day. Instead, use information about their location. Talk about their city or community, and you’ll see much better open rates.

Slide 13 – Add Benefits
Another tricky one here. You want to demonstrate a benefit to your potential reader, and let them know you have a sense of what they may be interested in, but too heavily benefited could be seen as spammy. Terms like “lose weight now,” or “make money today” are going to get your flagged as spam, and your recipient may never see your message. Find out what your recipient is interested in, and direct your attention there. A few example might be: “check out our webinar to increase sales”, or “We’re having a sale at (Location) Saturday.”

Slide 14 – Missing Out
Make your recipients feel like they are missing out on something big. Try putting time limits in your subject lines to push people to read now. This one can be tricky though. Too short of a timeframe can be off-putting and stress your recipient out. Stress makes your recipient lose interest fast, and not care about your offering. Try using more open-ended timeframes like “limited spots left,” or “limited deals available.”

Slide 15 – Call to Action
If you can, try to include a call to action in your email. If you want your reader to do something specific, let them know from the beginning. Example would include terms like “register for our webinar,” or “sign-up to receive discounts.” You can even use more personal subjects if you are targeting potential customers like “I’d like a minute to discuss (whatever).” It lets your readers know from the beginning why you are reaching out and can create trust up front.

Slide 16 – Subject Line Do Not’s
Just as there are great things to do, there are also a lot of things you should make sure you steer clear from doing.

Slide 17 – Don’t go Negative
People enjoy being excited about things. By going negative, you turn people off from opening your email, or, if they do open it, they enter your content with a negative viewpoint. Subjects like “Not doing (this) is hurting your businesses,” or “You’ve missed out on (whatever),” You’re creating a negative tone, and can also be seen as insulting your potential client.

Slide 18 – Don’t Use all Caps
This just makes it seem like you are yelling at your audience and, again, gets into that threatening behavior. While it may catch an eye in a person’s inbox, it gives off a level of arrogance that your intended reader will not want to engage.

Slide 19 – Don’t Use a Subject Line that is Unrelated to Your Content
Exaggerating the actual content of your email in the subject line, or even worse, writing something with the sole purpose of getting opens, but has nothing to do with your business is one of the worst tactics you could use. Sure, you may get opens on that first email campaign, but you will quickly see that drive down as you completely lose the trust of your audience.

Slide 20 – Don’t use Spammy Words
Spammy words will ensure your emails never make it to their desired recipients inbox, and rather end up in the lost spam folder.  just a few common examples of words that, when used in subject lines can flag your email as spam, keeping your message from even getting into your recipients’ inboxes: Free, opportunity, affordable, bargain, cheap, discount, deal, hello, friend, sale, #1, 100%, guarantee, no-obligation, trial, risk free, satisfaction guaranteed, call. Just don’t use them.

Slide 21 – Statistics
Now that you have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t here is some statistical data to back up what you’ve learned here today.

Slide 22 – General Stats
• Subject lines alone are responsible for 33% of email opens
• Personalized subject lines have a 20% higher open rate
• 69% of spam is reported based on email subject lines alone
• 66% of total email opens are on mobile

Slide 23 – Subject Line Length
• Shorter subject lines often perform better because keywords are visible in recipients
email clients
• 40% of emails are on mobile first
(4–7 words visible on screen)
• Effective word choice within the visible portion of the subject line has more impact than length

Slide 24 – High Performing Keywords
Here are a few words that prove to have high performance measurements for your campaigns:
• “Urgent”
• “Announcement”
• “Free”
• “Tomorrow”
• “Re: ”
• (no subject)

Slide 25 – Low Performance Keywords
A few more words that may not be considered spammy, but have low performance are words like:
• “Help”
• “Reminder”
• “Meeting”
• “You”
• “Quick”
• “FW: ”

Slide 26 – Example
For a quick example of a great tool we use here at Qebot, I’m going to switch over to the Qebot platform itself. Here, among a number of tools to help you run your marketing and business operations, we have email marketing. For time purposes I’ve skipped through the campaign set up and put us right here into our integrated partner, Mailchimp’s subject line researcher tool. Here you can check keywords for your email campaign.

For this example, we’re working as a local retailer or heating service provider looking to have a winter sale that the business wants people to register a time for. We used sale, winter, and registration as our main keywords to our subject line.

Here, the system, using data that it has aggregated over the millions of emails it sends per day is able to show you what keywords get good open rates, how you can pair some of these words together, and what to not use. A very handy tool for ensuring you are getting the most out of your subject line.

Slide 27 – Wrap Up
Thanks for joining us today. We hope you found this topic to be interesting and informative. Email marketing can be one of the best tools in your marketing bag to keep your business on the top of mind for your customers. Just make sure you know how to get them to open those emails.

Slide 28 – Q&A
Now, we’ll answer a few questions that have come in during the webinar. As suggested, we are only going to answer a few questions today to stay within our allotted timeframe. If we do not answer your question, feel free to email it to success@qebot.com, and we’ll answer it directly.

Slide 29 – Find Out More
Thanks again for your time today. Please keep a look out for next month’s date and subject for our Qebot Coffee Break series.

Want to learn more about how Qebot can help you grow you business? Check us out at qebot.com.