Email marketing is an indispensible element in relationship marketing, enabling you to build rapport and target your promotional messages at people who have already signaled their interest in your products and services. It is also a fantastic way to cement and nurture relationships with existing customers.

But to get good results with email marketing you have to get the basics right. First you have to build an email list of people who want to hear from you. Next you need to craft a series of compelling messages. Then you have to make sure that the emails get through to the people on your list. Once your emails have been delivered, you need to get people to read and respond to them – no small feat and the one aspect of email marketing that most business owners have the most difficulty with.

So how do you get people to open your emails?

Quite simply, if you want to get your emails opened and read you must have a good headline. Here are some useful pointers for what makes a good email headline:

1. Make It Interesting – Don’t just say “I have a new article about video marketing for you”, say “Here’s an article that is going to show a sure-fire method of getting your video on page 1 of Google”
2. Answer the What’s In It For Me question – Stress the benefits to your target customer and give them a compelling reason for opening your email
3. Use Numbers – For Some unknown reason, people are more likely to respond to emails with numbers in the title. So for example, an email that starts with “4 Mistakes Business Owners  Make When…” will get a better response than “Mistakes Business Owners Make When…”
4. Questions work better than statements so use them liberally. “How Many of these 7 Skin care Sins Are You Guilty Of?” is better than “Here Are 7 Skincare Sins Most People Are Guilty Of”.
5. Keep it short
6. Make it look like a personal message, use a conversational tone and include the customer’s first name
7. Avoid words that are going to make your customer immediately consign it to the trash bin or get caught by the ISP’s spam filter – e..g. “Free offer”.

If you follow these simple tips you should see immediate improvement in your email open and response rates.