QUICK TIP: When optimizing emails, I rarely start with what’s inside the email , you know, easy-to-tweak elements like the subject line or body copy. And there’s a great (read: strategic) reason why. Here’s where I recommend you focus first:
TRANSCRIPT:
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when they are optimizing their emails, of course, other than not optimizing them, is that they dive straight into looking at what’s inside the email.
So optimizing things like the subject line, the email body copy, everything inside the email.
That’s not usually where I start when I start working with a company and we’re looking at optimizing that email system.
That’s because the first question I want to ask is at the strategic level. That’s where we stand to have the most impact. Should we even be sending this email? Why this email? Why this topic? How does this fit into an overall strategy? How does this map back to the conversion context? Are we even focused on the right messages?
That’s the more important question to ask before you get distracted with what’s actually in the email.
If you busy yourself with optimizing subject lines and body copy for emails that aren’t maybe the strongest choice for moving someone through the stages of awareness and moving them closer to that conversion goal, then you’re unlikely to see much of an actual impact on whatever that conversion goal is.
You really want to start by looking at the overall sequence strategy.
How is it structured? How does it fit into the overall sales process? How does it map to those stages of awareness?
That will help you also decide what those email themes need to be. You need to make sure you’re picking the email themes that are going to have the biggest impact based on what you know about your customer or your prospect and what they need to hear to move forward, making the most impactful points at the email theme level.
And only then do you want to fuss about your subject lines and your body copy, once you’ve settled in on these are the strongest messages for us at this time to move a prospect from point A to point B.
