Here are some ideas to consider, inspire you and get you on the right track.

1. Think about newspaper headlines
The big and bold headlines of a newspaper are there specifically to grab one’s attention—how is a subject line any different? Both of them have the sole purpose of enticing a reader. What makes newspaper headlines an idea generator is that they’re generally written in a concise manner and are very descriptive. For example, you can take a headline from a business-related column and simply tweak it to make it about marketing.

2. Pack a punch at the beginning
If you don’t grab their attention at the beginning, what are the odds that they’re going to be enticed at the end? With a subject line, you have a matter of a few seconds to convince your reader to open that email to see what you have to say. More so, many email clients only display the first 50 characters anyway, which is why it’s so vital to make them count. Here’s a tip: try to think of some adjectives that are impactful and appealing to start your subject line.

3. Throw out the old rules on “free”
Everyone is so against the word “free” in a subject line—at least they used to be. Unless your subject line starts with “free” or you have the word completely capitalized, you really don’t have anything to worry about. The reason we point this out is that this a word we were told to stay away from for years, but it’s also a word that people still react to. At Knowledge Marketing, we say it’s ok to use the word “free” in a subject line as long as you’re not being misleading.

4. Remember that a sense of urgency is compelling
With many marketing efforts, it’s good practice to instill a sense of urgency with any special deal or offer you’re making to your customer or prospect. Few tactics will compel someone to subscribe or purchase more than urgency. Knowledge Marketing suggests the use of urgency and deadlines as part of a planned campaign or series of email messages. For example, use the timeframes of “one week left” in your subject line and then “2 days remain” in your subject line to coerce readers into taking action.

5. Time for a test
Like with everything else in marketing, it’s imperative that you test, test test. How else can you be sure of what your prospects and clients are responding to? Knowledge Marketing’s ECN makes it really simple to test two different subject lines with the same message. With the simple push of a radio button, the A/B campaign feature drops down and to allow you to select you message, assign how many recipients to each message and then a “Message A Subject” and a “Message B Subject” field appear. It’s that simple to do some testing on your subject lines.

In addition to our marketing expertise, KM has an amazing suite of email marketing tools and features built right into our platform. Feel free to contact us to find out more about them and how to hit that inbox!

Spam and deliverability are always hot topics among marketers–especially as those variables are quickly changing and evolving. Entrepreneur recently published a great article on those specific issues. An interesting statistic they included is that nearly one in four commercial emails doesn’t make it to the inbox and is either shunted to spam folders or blocked altogether.

How Not to Be a Spammer When Marketing Your Business

KM has an amazing suite of email marketing tools and features built right into our platform. Feel free to contact us to find out more about them and how to hit that inbox!

Recently, MarketingSherpa published a case study based on a digital publisher that revamped their welcome message by turning it into a series of messages. A new series of three emails now leverages focused messages and strategically designed graphics to walk readers through the various offerings.

5-step update of welcome campaign leads to 450% increase in new subscriber clickthrough rate

KM has an amazing suite of email marketing tools and features built right into our platform. Feel free to contact us to find out more about them!

The conference, The Customer Driven Future: Turn Data into Knowledge into Action, is designed to present cutting-edge, cost-effective ways to gather the necessary data to drive future strategies and a new age of winning B-to-B product development.

“We’re honored to be members of American Business Media and are very much looking forward to leveraging the expertise and experience of the other members while at the conference,” said Joe Benson, President of Knowledge Marketing.

Utilizing Knowledge Marketing’s ECN™ platform, integrated media companies can manage audience development, send email marketing and use KM’s Masterfile technology. To learn more about Knowledge Marketing’s solutions and services, please visit www.knowledgemarketing.com.

About Knowledge Marketing (KM)
Knowledge Marketing (KM) is an on-demand software and services company delivering a unique blend of technology and industry knowledge to help companies grow a profitable online channel with their cross channel marketing platform, ECN™. Its high performance, secure and scalable platform provides a single solution to connect with customers to optimize email marketing efficiencies, automated email delivery, robust segmentation and integrated social, mobile, surveys, digital editions and analytics. With nearly a decade of expertise, the solution portfolio also consists of Publutions, Govlutions and Good Donor, a series of KM products focused on those vertical markets served delivering high value and quantifiable results.

For more information about Knowledge Marketing, please contact:
Christina Belmont
Digital Marketing Specialist
christina.belmont@teamkm.com

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According to MarketingProfs, nearly half a billion people check their email on the go, and 20% of all email is opened on a smartphone. Now that mobile devices are becoming a more and more popular platform we face a whole new set of challenges when it comes to email marketing.

The following tips are geared toward helping you move your email marketing efforts in a direction that will make messages more accessible across all platforms—something that’ll work as well on an iPhone as it will on a desktop computer.

The From Line
You might not have given this component much thought before, but you have to now. The from line is now more prevalent than ever. That might sound crazy, but with the increase in the use of mobile devices, the name of who sent you the email is larger and bolder than the subject line. I know it’s easy to agonize over that perfect subject line (believe me, I do this myself), but that might just be wasting your time now. Here’s what we suggest—make sure the from line is a basic representation of your company and that it is easily recognizable. This is necessary to your message getting recognized and read instead of ignored. Also, try to make sure that your subject line and from line aren’t too repetitive of each other.

Mobile Design
Like everything else, Web and email design has its trends. Currently, the trends appear to be going back to the basics. By the basics, we’re talking about moving back toward a balanced ratio of images to text and ensuring the vital content in the email is visible with images turned off. Why is that? Many mobile devices limit the amount of graphics they load to avoid the extra steps and time it takes to download images.

Of course, if you had the time and budget you could create different emails to perfectly fit each of your targeted devices—but not many have those luxuries. Let’s focus on how to create one version of a message that will display well for both mobile and desktop email clients.

The goal is to keep things simplistic and uncluttered, which will allow the message to look great at half its size without looking odd if displayed at 100%. One method that helps with this is to design by using a grid system. Many designers do this anyway, but if the elements of your design are made according to a proper grid, the message will scale down while staying proportionate.

Sizing
The standard width for email messages is generally around the 600-pixel range. To be more specific, the screen on an iPhone has a width of 320-pixels. Since the iPhone is considered the standard for smartphone screens, plan on designing your email messages with a width of 640-pixels for a more proportionate scaling.
The topic of sizing also applies to the size of a font, too. It can be hard to gauge what an appropriate font size is that will work across various devices. At Knowledge Marketing, we recommend that your body text shouldn’t go below 12 pixels. However, we also recommend that you use your best judgment when it comes to different fonts and that it never hurts to test across multiple devices before sending that campaign.

Strong Call to Action
Is your call to action button hidden in your message? This is one part of your message that can’t afford to get lost. Make sure that your call to action is leaping off the page and that it is brightly colored and simple to read. Another way to simply emphasize your call to action is to add a text shadow or rounded corners—something to differentiate those elements from the rest are what you’re looking for when it comes to your call to action. Small details can make big differences. After all, what’s the point of sending a campaign with little to know call to action?

Also, make sure to leave plenty of space for people to click on the call to action buttons. Think ahead about how fingers are going to navigate the clickable areas of your email on a smartphone or tablet’s screen—be sure to add plenty of padding around the area recipients will be clicking within your message. We recommend around 10 pixels between clickable items (links, buttons), which should ensure your recipients plenty of space for inaccurate fingers.

Take your campaign full circle
In many cases, your email message is going to be sending visitors to a custom landing page as part of a full campaign. All the above rules should apply to the landing page as well—you don’t know what kind of device your recipient will be using when they open your email marketing message.

KM has been an expert in email marketing for nearly 10 years! Contact us us today to find out how we can help with your marketing needs.