First of all, I’m assuming at this point that your recipients will recognize you from your “From Label”. I’ve written why your From Label is very important
in your email marketing campaigns. If they are familiar with who the
email is coming from, you’ll have better luck getting your email opened
with a catchy subject line.

As a retailer your email marketing
campaigns are probably all about selling. If you sell your own products
or products from other manufacturers, you’ll be trying to announce new
products, new seasons or discounts and sales. You’ll want your
recipients to act fast, so you may want to try expiration dates in your
subject line. We even see businesses using hours in the day in their
expiration time periods.

You’ll see that some of these subject
lines are a bit vague like “An Exclusive Offer for You”, however
sometimes that might get more opens than if you talk about a specific
product. That’s something that you need to test for yourself in your own
campaigns.

Offer, Offer, Offer

Enjoy this Special Offer at Our New Location

25-40% off – Email-Only Offer – Today Only

Invitation-Only 2 Hour Event Starts 11:30 AM CT

Ends Today! 20% Off Friends & Family

Top 10 under $10

Free shipping – offer ends in 3 days

Free product with purchase of [product name]

[New Product] has arrived. Order now before we run out.

Earn double points for [insert product or action].

Last Chance: Get up to $25 now

Save 10% on your next order

Enjoy [season] with rates from $65

Service Notice: Exciting new changes at [your company]

An Exclusive Offer for You

[Your company] October Specials

Last minute deals, special offers, and new [product name]

Act Now to renew your [subscription name]

Online only: 25% off friends and family

Introducing our latest…[product/feature here]

[Product name] Promotion week. Save 25%

Extended for a day! Get Free shipping through Friday

Stock up and save 15%

Limited Supply: Limit 2 [product name] per customer

Ho-ho-ho: The [your company] holiday catalog is here!

Email subscriber exclusive: [Product name] sale is here

Ends Today: Take 20% off your entire order

Private Sale Ends Today

Your choice of amazing items $50 + under

Great gifts for [Dad, Mom, etc]

Best Sellers every [girl, boy, man, woman, dog, etc.]

Everything you need when the temperatures [rise, fall]

Free Shipping–Limited Time Offer

Catchy & Creative

Sometimes all you need is a little vase lift  (retailer selling vase’s)

We’ve got you covered from head to toe (retailer selling hats, shirts, pants and boots)

How La Perla got its name (retailer selling lingerie, telling a story inside the email)

Temperatures Fall, Style Rises (retailer selling coats)

Celebrity Favorites (selling accessories that Hollywood is wearing)

Did you remember to get a gift? It’s ok, we did. (retailer wanting to get people to register for gift reminders)

10 Gift Ideas for your little ones (retailer listing top 10 suggestions for kids)

Manhattan View for a Song in the Shower (retailer selling shower curtain with Manhattan skyline on it)

Take your pick: Our 9 Favorite Dresses (retailer suggesting by popularity)

Coolest modern desk on the job…for $149 (retailer including price in the subject line)

Score Great Savings on Game-Time Gear: HDTVs, Furniture & More (retailer selling TV’s with a sports slant)

Party Like it’s 1999 Aged Cabernet Special (wine retailer)

In our store: Last minute Mother’s Day combo ready to go (retailer getting the last minute shoppers with a catch “combo to go”.)

Adorn Your Home Now & Through the Holidays (Home decor retailer)

Mind-Blowing Grenache (wine retailer)

Bring this email to a Gap store and win! (retailer trying to get store traffic)

I hope this gets your creative juices flowing. You can also find some great holiday-specific subject lines here. If you’ve got some great subject lines that have worked for your business, comment and let us know. 

Send Your First 250 Emails Free - Increase your customer sales with email coupons, newsletters and sales announcements from VerticalResponse, an award winning email marketing provider.

The post 50 All-Time Great Retail Email Subject Lines appeared first on AddMe Blog.

1. Put an offer on the back of your business cards to get people to sign up for your newsletter.
2. Tradeshows – Bring a clipboard or sign-up book with you to tradeshows and ask for permission to send email to those who sign up.
3. Include a newsletter sign-up link in your signature of all of your emails.
4. Send an opt-in email to your address book asking them to join your list.
5. Join your local chamber of commerce, email the member list (if it’s opt-in) about your services with a link to sign up to your newsletter.
6. Host your own event – Art galleries, software companies (one here has a party every quarter and invites the neighboring businesses), retail shops, consultants (lunch & learn) can all host an event and request attendees to sign up.
7. Offer a birthday club where you give something special to people who sign up.
8. Incentivize your employees – Give them $ for collecting VALID email addresses.
9. Giving something for free like a PDF? Make visitors sign up to your opt-in form before you let them download it.
10. Referrals – Ask you customers to refer you, and in exchange you’ll give them a discount.
11. Bouncebacks – Get them back! – Send a postcard or call them asking for their updated email address.
12. Trade newsletter space with a neighboring business, include a link for their opt-in form and ask them to include yours in their newsletter.
13. SEO – Make sure you optimize your site for your keywords. You need to be at the top of the natural search when people are looking for your products or services.
14. Giveaways – Send people something physical and ask for their email address as well as their postal address.
15. Do you have a postal list without emails? Send them a direct mail offer they can only get if they sign up to your email list.
16. nclude opt-in forms on every page on your site.
17. Popup windows – When someone attempts to leave your site, pop up a window and ask for the email address.
18. Include a forward-to-a-friend link in your emails just in case your recipient wants to forward your content to someone they think will find it interesting.
19. Include a forward-to-a-friend on every page of your site.
20. Offer a community – Use Ning as your easy-to-set-up community and have your visitors interact and sign up for your newsletter.
21. Offer “Email only” discounts and don’t use those offers anywhere but email.
22. Telemarketing – If you’ve got people on the phone, don’t hang up until you ask if you can add them to your newsletter.
23. Put a fishbowl on your counter and do a weekly prize giveaway of your product – then announce it to your newsletter. Add everyone who put their card in on to your newsletter list.
24. Include an opt-in form inside your emails for those people who get your email forwarded to them.
25. Tradeshows – Collect business cards and scan them into a spreadsheet. Make sure you ask permission to send email to them, then mark the card.
26. Use Facebook – Host your own group and invite people to it, then post new links often. From time to time, post a link to sign up for your newsletter.
27. Use Facebook – Post the hosted link from your newsletter into Linked Items to spread the word.
28. Use Facebook – Include an opt-in form on your Facebook Fan page.
29. Use Twitter – Twitter the hosted link of your email campaign every time you launch.
    If you’ve got any additional ideas, let’s hear them!

Send Your First 250 Emails Free – Increase your customer sales with email coupons, newsletters and sales announcements from VerticalResponse, an award winning email marketing provider.

The post 29 Ways to Collect Email Addresses for Your Business appeared first on AddMe Blog.

For
businesses that market to consumers, you’ll probably find buttons like
“Sign Up Now” or “Buy Now.” If you’re marketing to businesses and you
offer a white paper you might use the text “Download Now” or if you’ve
got a tutorial for your viewers to watch it might be “View the Demo.” At
any rate, an “actionable” word will usually work better than a passive
one on your button. Instead of saying “Free Trial” you might try
something like “Start Your Free Trial.” All of these things might seem
subtle, but they also might get your readers doing what you want them to
do. 

In the end, it’s all pretty scientific, so as always we suggest you test both and see what works for your own audience!

Some great resources I found for creating buttons:

Best Practices for Using Buttons 

35 Creative call to action buttons for inspiration

How to Make an Effective Call to Action Button

Are you seeing a better response with buttons?

Send Your First 250 Emails Free
- Increase your customer sales with email coupons, newsletters and
sales announcements from VerticalResponse, an award winning email
marketing provider.

The post Use Buttons instead of Links and Increase Your Clicks appeared first on AddMe Blog.

ROI (Return on Investment) – Your ROI is
the measure of the profit you make and/or costs saved at your business.
For your email marketing campaigns you calculate cost of sending email
plus time.

ROI = [(Payback - Investment)/Investment)]*100

So
if you made $780 on your email campaign, your time was worth $50 to
create it and it costs $15 to send it it would look like this:

(($780 – $65)/$65)*100 = 1100% ROI (which is really good!)

If you want to take it a step further subtract your cost of your products or services as well.

Open Rate – Your open rate is simply the number recipients who opened your HTML emails. It is typically
measured as a percentage of the total number of emails sent,
although
calculation methods may differ. The open rate is considered a useful
metric for judging response to an email campaign but it should be noted
that open rates for text emails can’t be calculated AND some email
clients don’t display images as a default which would under report your
total number of opens.

Above the Fold – The
bottom of your browser window or the bottom of your email before you
have to start scrolling is commonly referred to as
the “fold”. These viewable areas should be where your most important
information should be located since it’s the first thing your viewer
will see.

Preview Pane – Email programs like Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, and Mac Mail allow
users to view email through a preview pane before your recipient clicks to open. The preview pane is
important to bear in mind when composing the opening lines of an email so you can get your recipient’s attention fast.

Copy – Your copy is simply the text of the email you write.

Hosted Email
- A hosted version of an email allows users to view the email message
as
a web page, ensuring that all formatting remains intact.
VerticalResponse does this for you for free you just need to include the
“hosted version” link. Hosted versions of your email are also great for
you to send your Twitter and Facebook followers to when you launch your
campaign.

Spoofing – Email spoofing involves forging a sender’s address on email messages.
It can be used by malicious individuals to mislead email recipients
into reading and responding to deceptive mail. These fake messages can
jeopardize the online privacy of consumers and damage the reputation of
the companies purported to have sent the messages. Spoofed email often
contains phishing scams. VerticalResponse doesn’t allow for this in our systems.

Phishing – In a phishing scam, a spammer, posing as a trusted party such as a bank
or reputable online vendor, sends email messages directing recipients
to Web sites that appear to be official but are in reality fraudulent.
Visitors to these Web sites are asked to disclose personal information,
such as credit card numbers, or to purchase counterfeit or pirated
products.

Targeting – Targeting gives you the
ability to deliver emails to those most likely to respond to your
emails, based on a variety of things like their geographic, demographic,
psychographic
and behavioral information.

Whitelists – Whitelists are usually created by an ISP (internet service
provider) and are made up of commercial emailers (including ESPs) who have
been approved to send email through their gates. The ISP requires a list of IP (internet protocol) addresses that
email will be sent from, and in some cases a test period where the
commercial emailer will be approved or rejected. VerticalResponse is on all available whitelists.

Web Friendly fonts – Almost all web browsers are capable of displaying four primary fonts
properly: Times, Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana, as well as their
variants (Arial Narrow, Times New Roman, etc.) If a web developer
decides to stray from one of these fonts he or she risks browser
compatibility problems and the prospect that their pages may render
inaccurately when viewed through certain web browsers.

Got any other terms you were wondering about? Let us know!

Find out more about VerticalResponse.

The post 11 Email Marketing Terms You Need to Know appeared first on AddMe Blog.