What are the Best Practices for Creating Influencial Subject Lines?

[Anonymous]

Hello Marketo Community...

I am a relatively new Marketo user and now feel fairly comfortable creating email campaigns.  Now that I have the mechanics down, I am trying to improve my success rates.  Can anyone share with me some best practices on how to develop strong subject lines that will drive open rates?  Tips, tricks and best practices on what type of content will drive customers to click on links, fill out forms, etc... to influence them to action?  This information may already be out there in the community, as I'm sure I'm not the first to ask this question, but I also don't know how to find information in or use the Marketo Community.  This is my first question .

We are a B2B manufacturer with a well defined customer base.  Our challenge is that we are the smallest competitor in the market place and are trying to slay the giant!

I'd love to hear from anyone who has advice, suggestions or even recommended readings that will help me be more successful with Marketo.

Thanks in advance for any feedback and help!

Terry

[SanfordWhiteman]

I also don't know how to find information in or use the Marketo Community. This is my first question .

Start by moving your question to Marketing Central​. "Community" is for questions about the Marketo Nation website itself (which I guess is also one of your questions, and yes, many sections are confusingly named).

• Peer-to-peer support questions related to the Marketo product line, and technical questions about martech matters, fall into Products​.
• General non-technical questions across the marketing discipline go in Marketing Central.

But even those rules will be seemingly broken by blog posts (as opposed to user questions) in Marketing Central. Since Products doesn't allow blog posts, they end up getting published in MC, even if they're highly technical. (As the author of several such posts, I wish they could go into Products, but alas....)

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your guidance! 

[Kim_Allen]

Hi,

You have a couple of questions here...

1. For the Community, it can be a GREAT resource. Most of what you are looking for is probably in the Marketing Central section > Discussions. This is a great place to ask questions, search other previous questions (that may answer yours), and just browse (see how other ppl use MKTO). You also will want to check out and probably bookmark product docs - Welcome to Marketo Docs - Marketo Docs - Product Docs  this will have everything about Marketo's basic configuration and uses.

2. For the subject line question, it's different for every company and industry. The cool thing is that you can test this and see how they perform to start to benchmark your own subject line successes.

Kim

[Anonymous]

Thank you Kim,

I will try to navigate to the sections you and Sanford recommended.

[Chris_Johnston]

A/B Testing is by far the best way to start to see how the same content is interacted with.

Find out how: Use "Subject Line" A/B Testing - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

From there, it really depends on the audience. I know when I was starting out, I went and subscribed to all of my competitors newsletters and learned how they spoke to their clients. It gave me a chance to a) figure out what they were doing and b) find holes to exploit or at least craft a different voice to stand out.  You can also go to different industries and see how they speak to their clients. (Maybe create a separate gmail account that you don't mind getting spammed).  Figure out what makes you want to open, and see how you might be able to apply it to your campaigns.

After all that, just remember to stay true and authentic to your brand voice and test to see what works.