It’s worth noting also that eMarketer found a correlation with shorter email subject lines and an increase in the read rate – take away from this that your subject line can be more important than the content. What good is fantastic content if your audience never reads it because the subject line is so NOT interesting?

Cheers,

Rebekah

More than six out of 10 US high school and college students surveyed “never” or “hardly ever” read marketing e-mails, according to an October 2008 survey by eROI. The majority of respondents said companies were not effectively speaking to them personally through e-mail.

And look at this little graph – text messaging is often the preferred communication method!

I’ve done quite a bit of marketing to High School & College students for my clients via Facebook and MySpace and have fantastic successes by keeping our messaging in the tone and manner that the students use. We don’t say “Would you like to join our fan page” we say “Hey there, we’ve just setup the fan page so we can do giveaways and stuff, here’s the link if you’re interested”. Fortunately for us, MySpace & Facebook both have SMS alerts for users, so part of our great response is undoubtedly do to our recipients being able to reply via their mobile phones.

But are you ready to embark on the world of SMS messaging? For some it’s a hard question to answer. First timers rarely have a database of cellphone numbers in their back pocket, so list purchasing is often your first recourse – and that can get expensive. What would you do with it anyway?

One bar we know of sends a SMS message (aka Text) to their subscribers with the daily special, and that could be broadened to a message containing what teams are playing on their tv’s that night, or what band is playing on that night. Ever noticed a commercial on the TV saying “just text PIZZA to 23434″? That’s how American Idol handles much of their voting process.

As with any marketing tool there’s a myriad of ways to employ both SMS and Email Messaging, what you must always ask yourself is “What does my audience want to hear?” and “What will inspire my audience to take action?”. A message saying Our new Phone system is the best solution for VOIP is much less likely to do you any good compared to Win a free sfsd phone, the same one that saved XYZ company $300 last month, just text MINE to 23453″. When you can get out of your head (stop thinking about what do I want to say), and you get into the mindset of what your audience wants to hear – the results come immediately after.