Consistent Email Messages

It is very important to have a consistent message in your emails from the very opening (subject line) to the end (landing page).  If you don’t do this, your recipients will get confused and your response rates will suffer.  Many companies get very excited because they have such high open rates.  However, you could have high open rates from killer subject lines but extremely poor click and conversion rates because the email did not contain what your recipient expected.

Subject Line: An Introduction to your Offer

It is very important to have a good subject line in order to entice the recipient to open your emails.  This will set you apart from similar offers.  However, you want a subject line that summarizes what you are offering so that the recipient will not be surprised when they open the email.  If they open the email and the message does not convey what the recipient was initially interested in (perhaps 30% off a certain) product, the recipient will discard your email.

Header:  A Quick Summary of your Offer

A header is a great way to summarize the offer you are giving to the recipient.  An example would be bigger bolder text telling the recipient they will receive a 30% discount if they click through to your landing page.  If this header matches the original subject line, the recipient will know they are still on the right track and continue looking at the rest of your email content.

Email Content: To Click or Not To Click

The rest of your email content should support the messages you just stated in your subject line and header.  If it does, you have a good chance of the recipient clicking through to your landing page.

This sounds easy enough, but one of the problems I have seen is that the creative will give the recipients too many offers and the recipient gets confused thinking where did that 30% offer go?  Therefore the opener never becomes a clicker.

Landing Page: The Place to Convert

This is one of the most important places to carry your message through from the email.  This is where the recipient will potentially convert to a customer, and many are lost in the land of the landing page.

Once again, a big problem is when the landing page does include the original offer, but it also includes a lot of other offers.  This is not straightforward to the recipient and the confusion may cause them to give up.

Another problem can be if there is not a landing page at all.  If you send them to a search result and there is no mention about this great discount they are about to receive, they may not want to go through all of the trouble of adding an item to their cart just to find out they were not going to get the discount they were expecting.

The Keys to Success: Consistency and Simplicity

The main thing to note from this article is to keep your message consistent from your subject line all the way through to your landing page.  Another important aspect of messaging is to keep it simple.  Give them that 30% offer, but know that if you throw in other offers, it may just confuse them and cause them to give up.