Part of marketing for an upcoming tradeshow includes sending out emails to customer lists, and sending out emails to customers that you’d like to target (or just to let those people know that you are attending a show soon). But the one issue with sending out unsolicited emails is getting people to actually open up those emails. We’ve become pretty good at sifting out spam emails, so it’s becoming trickier and trickier to devise subject lines that will grab attention and result in opened emails.
But, we’ve gathered up a few from various sources that tend to get the best responses. If you are going to send out emails to people, try one of these subject lines (and do remember that you can’t simply send out the same email with the same subject line to hundreds of people – your email address will be blocked by various providers as spam!).
- Tell the truth: try a subject line that’s simple and to the point like, “here is our newsletter, won’t you read it?” Sometimes, people just want an ounce of truth to go with that newsletter that you want them to read and enjoy.
- Try your hand at a news topic: have you ever wanted to craft a catchy news headline like you see in papers or on the evening news? Try creating a subject line that shocks.
- Use a statistic: this one runs along those news lines too, but sometimes throwing a statistic or two into a subject line is a good way to surprise people and catch their attention.
- Include a person’s name: if you have the name of the person you want to connect with, simply include that person’s name in the subject line.
- Use one word: for some reason, people like emails that just have one word in the subject line – a popular one is “hey!”
- Consider punctuation: would you respond to an exclamation point more than a question mark or other? Use punctuation to capture attention.
- Let your sentence disappear: purposely make your subject line disappear into those three ellipses (…). Something like, “hey, have you seen this…” can really work. Why? It piques curiosity.
- Give a command: for some reason, people like to be told what to do while online. This tip works for websites, and it works for email subject lines too. Simply tell people what to do with one word like, “go!”
Tying It All Together
You can use email marketing before you set up exhibit booths and attend a tradeshow, or you can use email marketing after you’ve taken down your exhibit booths by gathering emails from the show (hopefully you’ve included some kind of email sign up for booth visitors!). Either way, email marketing is an integral part of any tradeshow experience, so make sure that you consider it – and think about those subject lines!
The other thing that we want to point out is that you should be testing your email responses using some kind of email program. This way, you can decide if bad tradeshow displays were to blame for your lack of response, or if you just need help with your email marketing campaign. We can make your tradeshow displays better by creating tradeshow displays that stand out – but you’re on your own when it comes to email marketing, unless you read through this blog!