You talkin' to me?

Yeah you, you talkin' to me? If you know this scene in Taxi Driver, with leading man (Robert Di Nero), then you know he's kind of edgy. And I can sympathise with his emotional instability every day when I recive an email from a company that speaks to me like I'm a walking ATM. You know the mails, all business talk, utterly impersonal and very very dull. Worse still, it's the opening email from someone I've never met or heard of before.

Stop it. Seriously, stop it.

If you ever get stuck into this rut (as in you are sending brain dead emails), it may well be the culture of your organisation is putting marketing madness into your brain. In the misbelief that "sounding professional" in email communication means boring the crap out of your subscribers (you know what I'm talking about), then take a good look at your engagement rates to see if its working. You may well be up against a wall of people that do not want to change the tone of your copy.

The answer? AB testing. Say what? Yes, AB testing will be your saviour here. If your current email marketing / email automation setup doesnt provide for this, then it's time for an upgrade. AB tests involve (as an example) testing email subject lines. Take a list of 10,000 people you want to email, send version A of your email to 1000 and version B to 1000, see which email version gets the most opens and send the remaining 8000 the winning email. BEWARE! often you will get suprised what the results are, so don't get cocky on your new killer subject line and how it will flatten the tradition corporate subject line. Be open and be up for change and challenge.

You cannot argue with the numbers, although that will never stop the subborn trying. You can use this to start the change of culture, to move your marketing folk to stop the b2b copy that actually sounds like conversations that two 1970's office blocks might have together. You might be the tail wagging the dog, yes, but it works - if you are up for the long game.

Dela Quist - one of the planet's leading email marketing experts has a tool to help you out, to help you choose the subject line that will get your carefully curated email opened.