With so much focus on the design, copywriting and call to action used in email marketing it’s easy to forget how important the subject line is. The seemingly innocuous subject line is more often than not the last thing to be considered in an email marketing campaign, but it’s essentially the deciding factor behind an email getting opened or deleted. It doesn’t matter how professional and effective the email is - if the subject line isn’t up to the job then the whole campaign is at risk of failing.

Think about your own daily inbox experience and the hoards of emails that you routinely delete without a second glance. If a subject line isn’t immediately attention-grabbing, and it’s an unexpected email, then the chances are that you won’t bother opening it. With so many other legitimate emails requiring so much attention, who can blame you?

So there’s really a lot riding on the subject line, therefore it’s vital to give it the same attention and planning that you give to the other elements of an email marketing campaign.

There are two main issues to consider when writing a subject line - firstly, how to avoid junk mail filters and secondly, enticing recipients enough to actually open your message and read it.

1) Junk mail filters, whether as part of email software packages or wider company security policies, use a number of triggers - one of which is the humble subject line. They’re principally on the lookout for any words that clearly identify an email as spam - you know the usual suspects - but often rope in entirely legitimate messages accidentally. Have a look at your own junk mail folder, amongst the viagra and fake Rolex spam there will be at least one innocent email that has been swept up indiscriminately. Look at the subject line of the unlucky email and you’re likely to find the reason why it’s in amongst the junk.

To avoid this fate befalling your next email marketing campaign, steer clear of using certain characters in your subject lines - £-signs, $-signs, exclamation marks and question marks can all inadvertently flag up an email as junk, despite having good reasons for being used.

As well as individual characters, there’s a whole host of words that you should avoid using in your subject lines - “free”, “buy”, “deal”, “best” and “greatest” being some of the most common. In fact, most superlatives provide nothing more than a fast-track to the spam folder. Modern junk mail filters are intelligent and have been created around years of experience detecting spam, so if your subject line sounds anything like it could be a con, then it’s likely to face the chop and never see your recipient’s main inbox.

2) Enticing your recipients to open an email requires some thought. Of course the subject line needs to refer to whatever you’re mailing about, but you need something special to make it stand out above the masses of other emails in an inbox. This really depends on the purpose of your message, the type of customer you’re targeting and what you’re aiming to achieve overall. The demands here vary wildly, but it is essential to think about what the customer will respond and react to.

If you’re sending a regular message to recipients who are expecting the email, then a standard subject line that they’ll become familiar with is a safe bet. If your client has a respected brand name then use it somewhere in the subject line - the trust-factor alone will ensure a good open rate.

An unexpected message, perhaps to a customer database, needs a tempting subject line that is careful not to cross the line into the sensationalist. Again, have a quick scan of your junk mail folder if you want to see sensationalist subject lines.

So in a nutshell, you know your email marketing is wonderful but your recipient doesn’t (yet), and it’s up to the subject line to win them over. It deserves to be more than an after-thought. It’s just as important as any other element of the campaign, and should be treated as such.

Along with SEO and web development, email marketing has been one of Greenmedia’s core services from day one.

Unlike some of the so-called email marketing experts out there, we’re not jumping on the bandwagon and we haven’t bought a generic off-the-shelf programme to do it for us. Our system has been created in-house by our own development team, and is based solely on the needs of our clients. It has developed over the years to become the email marketing system of choice for the likes of Aston Martin, Ferrari, Porsche and Audi, among others.

The success of any email marketing broadcast depends on several factors working together, and because of our many years of experience we know precisely what works and what doesn’t.

It’s always crucial to keep in mind the reasons why you’re doing a particular email marketing campaign - while it’s easy to come up with a nice looking e-flyer, if you ignore the other key issues you’ll find that the campaign will be a flop. There are lots of areas to consider, and making something presentable is a small part of the process. This isn’t about being a vanity project and creating something that appeals specifically to you - it’s about getting results, which means knowing your target customers and developing everything around meeting their needs.

At Greenmedia we know the design approaches that will grab readers’ attention and keep it. We know how to create call-to-action messages that get clicks and calls flooding in. We know the optimum broadcast time and day for your industry, and we’ve learned quite a few other things throughout our years of doing this. We know email marketing and we know how to make it work for your business.

Regularly refreshed content shows users (and search engines) that a website is current, up-to-date and worth visiting again - so it’s well worth the effort to write something new as often as you can. Updating a news page is a great way to do this, in support of the more permanent, long-term content on your website.

If you stick to a couple of simple rules, you’ll soon find that writing fresh content is a rewarding and straight-forward process.

Don’t stress about your ability. You don’t need to be a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist to write content. If you’ve got something worth saying and you can write to a basically grammatical standard, then you can do it. Like most things, the more you practice the easier it becomes.

Stay on topic. Take time to think about what you’re writing and why you’re writing it. While it may be tempting to use your website to tell the world about your latest pair of novelty socks or a funny-looking cloud you saw the other day, it isn’t a good idea as people simply aren’t interested. Why would they be? Worse still, irrelevant content will detract from your main focus and could end up driving users away. Take the search engine approach and give the users what they are looking for - which categorically isn’t a load of random nonsense that they’re not expecting.

We’ve continued our work with prestigious car marques this month, with a range of stunning email marketing campaigns for Aston Martin, Ferrari, Porsche and Audi, among others.

One of the many client dealerships taking part in a campaign, Lancaster Cambridge Aston Martin, sold three new V8 Vantage Roadsters as a direct result of the mailshot - achieving a remarkable return-on-investment.

“The results of the work that Greenmedia has carried out to date have been fantastic. We have seen numerous Aston Martin sales coming as a direct result of the mailout campaigns, and the effects have been almost immediate,” said Andy Matthews, Dealer Principal at Lancaster Cambridge Aston Martin.

We’re always thrilled to hear such positive results from our mailings, but we’re never surprised.

Our email marketing system has been developed in-house over a number of years to provide precisely what the client wants - clicks, calls and an absolutely incredible ROI. As well as the immediate sales impact that email marketing can generate, clients are able to check the statistics down to the last click-through - to find out exactly how a mailing performed. Our highly refined system coupled with striking bespoke mailer designs creates an irresistible combination, with an end-result that speaks for itself.

“We now firmly consider Greenmedia’s email marketing service to be among our most effective and economic marketing sources, and we’re looking forward to continuing the success with future promotions,” added Andy Matthews.

When you get over £300,000 in sales as a direct result of a single mailout, the value of our email marketing is there for all to see.

Take a look at some of this month’s e-flyers and see for yourself why they have been such a success;

• Aston Martin
• Ferrari
• Porsche
• Audi

We launched the Tuscany Restaurant website at the end of February, and were pleased to find some great search engine rankings already. The website is appearing as the first non-directory result on the first page of Google.com for the search “italian restaurant whitley bay”, and the first page of Google.co.uk for “tuscany restaurant” - great results considering the relevance of the keyterms, level of competition and the fact that the site has been live for less than two weeks.

Achieving results on Google can be a time-consuming process, and often depends on a massive number of variable factors. However, as Tuscany’s immediate results show, when a website has a clear topic, good coding standards and relevant copy, the process can be rapidly speeded up.

We were pleased this week to hear that one of our clients Home of Choice has won a prestigious national financial services accolade. The company was named ‘Best Mortgage Network’ at the Money Marketing Awards, in recognition of its continuously excellent work since beginning in 2005. Here at Greenmedia, this wasn’t a surprise. We began working with Home of Choice shortly after its launch, as it strived to position itself in a heavily competitive and established sector. Our bold new branding of the company was an instant hit, revamping the logo and corporate theme into an elegant, sophisticated and ultra-professional identity.

The brand has been highly successful since then - looking great across web, print and outdoor promotional materials, in fact, wherever it appeared. It was the perfect complement for the rapidly growing influence of Home of Choice, underlined by this week’s award.

We developed the brand identity for Home of Choice on the basis that it would be the very best in its field, and needed to look the part when it got there - an approach that has proven to be well-founded.

This month sees a redesign of one of Greenmedia’s best performing client websites, Northeast Audi.

We originally created the site as a bespoke web platform for the four Audi Approved dealerships in the region, giving staff the chance to update stock lists on a daily basis and customers a centralised website for all their Audi requirements. The site has been a huge success over the two years in which it has been running, due in no small part to the flexibility of content management, ease of use and supporting online marketing campaigns we’ve carried out.

We’re currently finalising a new look version of the site, designed in-house, which will be live online soon. The site is a stunning update that will refresh Northeast Audi into 2008 and beyond.

PPC is a powerful marketing tool that can potentially form your promotional backbone when operated correctly - making it the ideal platform to promote Xclusive Treats, the start-up boutique-style gifts website. Designed to support Xclusive’s launch period and all-important lead-in to Christmas, the PPC campaign needed to get it right first time.

When organising any PPC campaign, it’s best to break things down into smaller parts. Although it might be quicker initially to bunch all of your keywords up into one big ad group, it will impact on the management of the campaign further down the line and you may find that the whole thing can fast spiral out of control. If your product or service offering can be broken down into different areas, your PPC marketing can be as well. By overlooking structured ad groups you will also miss out on the assessment and reporting elements of PPC - essential if the campaign is going to run smoothly ongoing. Creating defined ad groups takes a little thought, but acts as the groundwork that will pay dividends later.

In creating the Xclusive Treats campaign, we looked at the product areas that were likely to be popular in the run-up to Christmas (hampers, spa vouchers, pet items etc) and created individual ad groups based on them. Using this approach, the campaign was divided up over the different markets. As each of the ad groups were essentially operating in different areas, we were able to individually manage their performance as required and ensure a successful campaign - something that would have been impossible with a single ad group.

We recently went live with Xclusive Treats, a new e-commerce website created to offer a massive range of luxury gifts and experiences all in one place. With a fantastic selection of items ranging from handmade jewellery to designer handbags, Xclusive Treats is the ideal site for Christmas shoppers looking for a unique present for a loved one. Experiences on the website cover everything from the adventurous (quad biking, sphering) to the luxurious (spa days, beauty treatments), across the North East region.

“The idea for Xclusive Treats came from a desire to provide a shopping solution for busy people who simply don’t have the time to trawl around the internet to find what they’re looking for,” explained Louise Milligan, founder of Xclusive Treats. “We’ve brought together some special suppliers that provide the very best in their respective areas, giving the website a really exclusive, boutique feel.”

The back-end of the website uses a Greenmedia bespoke CMS, the user-friendly system which allows the client to change everything displayed on the site, from page copy to individual products and images, meaning that the look of Xclusive Treats can be refreshed as often as required, and the site can grow over time.

Along with a broad-ranging promotional programme already underway, Xclusive Treats is backed by a Google Adwords campaign, focusing on the Christmas gifts markets for its various product lines.

SMS marketing is a really effective way to get a quick message out there, as proven with our latest text broadcast for Sunderland-based fashionistas Van Mildert and Cocolove. The designer-label retailers were hosting a charity fashion event and needed one last reminder to go out to customers on the day. While SMS can play a key part in any marketing campaign, it really shows its worth on occassions like this. With no design, no proofing and very little lead-time required to create and send a broadcast, SMS is easily the fastest marketing option currently available, and was the perfect choice for Van Mildert and Cocolove’s reminder. The event proved successful, with a high turnout and fantastic amount of money raised for charity, with the text reminder providing that final push to get more customers through the doors.

Text messages have the benefit of reaching your customers on a real personal level. As far as the customer is concerned, the text is a dedicated one-to-one communication, just for them. This is another distinct advantage for your marketing, as it is a rare opportunity to deliver an ‘exclusive’ message - something that people appreciate and act upon.