My neighbor Stan is in the advice business. And like all of us, he’s continually focusing on building his client base.

Stan decided to do an email marketing blast to a very targeted (and expensive) email list of prospects. I think the list was a bit more than 5,000.

Guess how many people opened the email? (I’m not talking about reading it, or acting on it-which are the next steps)…simply how many people just opened the email?

Zip…Nada…Bupkiss…

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway) Stan was pretty upset.

Anyway, I like Stan (he keeps an eye out on the house when Marian and I are on vacation) so I told him I’d do some editing on his email.

So I made one change and guess what? The second time the blast went out, the open rate was 21%. (Which is really good considering that this was a cold list that didn’t know Stan from the proverbial hole in the ground.)

So what was this change?

To fully appreciate it, we need to remember that in email marketing (and the same holds true for sales letters) there is a sequence of steps that we need to motivate the reader to go through.

With email that first step is…GET IT OPENED.

And there’s one thing that will make or break your prospects decision to do that .

What You Put In The Subject Line.

The first step in email marketing lives and dies on that one thing. (Of course we can mess up the process after that, but if we don’t get it opened, everything else is a moot point.)

So what do we want to put in the subject line?

Focus on “Negative Curiosity”

One of my coaches, Frank Kern, relates that the highest open rate he ever had for an email was one in which the subject line was, “Bad News.”

In fact, you may have noticed that I used this strategy for the email that eventually led you to read this article. The subject line? “What a disaster.”

But, here’s an important point you’ll want to keep in mind.

Although “Negative Curiosity” will get prospects to initially respond to your message, it’s “hope” that will both bond them to you, and ultimately get them to become actually clients.

One strategy to make the transition from “Negative Curiosity” to “Hope” is to offer your readers great content. Practical ideas they can use. Answers to the most common questions that you get asked. Remember, you want your reader at the end of your message to really believe you’re the expert in your particular field. That’s how you build relationships and eventually more paying clients.

But…the first step in the process is to get people to pay attention to you. That’s why focusing on “Negative Curiosity” in the subject line is so powerful. (But you have to do it creatively, not ham-handedly.)

Good luck, and as always, if I can ever be of assistance please let me know.

Thanks
Mark
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