Use the subject line to stand out in a crowded inbox. As I was sending out the first Small Farm Central monthly mailing list of the fall (click here to sign-up), I started to think about email subject lines.

This is, perhaps, the most important aspect of the mailing list because it determines if the recipient reads and acts on the email. If the subject line is uninteresting and causes the reader to ignore the email, then any text in the body of the email is meaningless.

I read into the subject methodology (see links below) and apparently the best route is A/B testing on possible subject lines. So if you have a mailing list of 95,000 -- a few days before the big delivery test one subject line to 1,000 readers (the "A") and another subject line to 1,000 other email addresses (the "B"). Then look at opening rates of the emails and the winning subject line goes out to the remaining 93,000 recipients.

Easy, right?

Well, when your email list is in the low 100s instead of the low 100,000s, you don't have the luxury of A/B testing.

So I guess us mortal mailing list managers have to try our best with the tools we have.

The October '08 mailing for my list was entitled:
"City Farmers get innovative with backyards and SFC cleans house"

which I think has to be better than:
"October 2008 Farm Marketing Newsletter"

Maybe you can think of an even more engaging subject line than I picked?

I think email subject lines are important for the farm mailing list because it absolutely does determine how many people open the message. Your customers are busy people just like you and you have to make them care.

Farmers have a distinct advantage over Target or Zappos.com because you have authenticity and you are selling something that consumers are actively searching for instead of a pair of shoes that can be bought at a dozen other outlets.

A good rule is to focus on what your customers care about first, so instead of:
"Weekly Product List for the week of May 5th",
try, "Last week for Asparagus! and see our young chicks grow"
 
This creates a feeling of urgency for asparagus and the promise of pictures or stories connects the reader to the farm. This type of subject line gives the potential reader a firm idea of the value that they will get if they click on the message.

If you want to go deeper into subject line research, you might like some of these articles:

• Copy blogger remixes some of his blog post title lines for more punchy goodness.
• Read this article for more information on the A/B testing as described above.
• Getting the subject line right: 5 tips for writing e-mail subject lines that'll get recipients to read on.

We've written about mailing lists a number of times in the past here on the blog

• 7 Thoughts as You Start the Summer Mailing List
• Sending emails professionally 
• Tips for collecting email addresses to add the farm mailing list.

Photo by procsilas

It is almost June. It is time to start or restart your summer mailing list.

Some thoughts, suggestions, tips. Feel free to add your own in comments.

Punctuality

How often do you send a notice to your mailing list? Perhaps once a week during the summer and once a month during the winter. It is important to create a clear schedule that you can communicate to new sign-ups on your website or in person. They want to know how often they will contacted and once you have made that promise, don't contact them more often or less often.

Unsubscribe

Mailing list recipients must have a mechanism to unsubscribe from further messages. A simple message at the bottom of your email to reply with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line is  sufficient. Professional mailing list managers, like Small Farm Central, will have an automated way for recipients to opt-out of your email so you don't have to manage the list.

Fill your list

Don't settle for a small list of committed friends and customers. If you are going to take the time to compose and send messages at regular intervals, it makes sense to send to as large a list as possible. I wrote many tips for gathering new email address late last year in Collecting Email Addresses.

Please don't BCC or CC

As you start your list, you may be sending your emails through a regular email client with all of the addresses copied and pasted into the BCC or CC fields of the email. This works for email lists under 100 recipients, but as your list grows, the technology solution must change. You run the risk of having your email message or worse, your email address, marked as spam if you are sending hundreds of emails through the BCC or CC field.

A professional solution sends each message individually. One positive aspect of this approach is that your mailing list members cannot see each other's email address. Also, many Internet Service Providers have a limit on how many messages can be sent per minute or hour; a professional approach will send the emails in small bursts to make sure the email gets to it's destination correctly.

Break it up

I imagine your farm has different kinds of customers: CSA members, beef buyers, regular Monday farmers market customers, or egg subscribers. It may be desirable to send different messages at different times to these groups of customers. One new aspect of Small Farm Central 2.0 (which came out in March of this year) is that each farm can create customer groups and send targeted emails to those groups.

For example, perhaps you send an availability list out to farmers market customers the night before the market. If you have one market on Monday and one market on Friday, it doesn't make sense to send the same message at the same time to both of those groups. So with the new system you can send a pertinent email to each group.

There are many other uses for this functionality: surely chefs at the restaurants you serve do not need the same information that farm stand customers want. Break it up as far as you want while still being able to manage the lists.

I presume that most stand-alone email solutions also provide a service like this.

Your customers love to hear from you!

You have a superior product and agricultural ideals - your customers want to buy your products, but it is often hard to remember to visit the farmers market, farm stand, or pick up the CSA box. It is not your customer's responsibility to remember that sides of beef are available in the Fall.

An email mailing list is a perfect way to remind customers of what you are offering, where you are offering, and why it is important. Americans check their emails numerous times per day (six times per day is the average), so an email is a great way to reach people and get attention.

More on sending mailing lists

Want to know how to get emails from here to there safely? There are lots of options, check out:
Sending Emails Professionally

This part 1 of the Successful Farm Email Lists series. A few easy techniques, followed consistently, will yield surpringly good results in growing your mailing list.

Collecting emails from your customers is an easy task and a large email list can build up very quickly if you use some simple techniques faithfully. If you go to farmer's markets or otherwise interact with the public, your email sign-up list should be ready everyday. Each time you make a sale to a new customer be sure to ask them if they want to sign up for your mailing list and have an elevator pitch ready such as, "We just send an email out every two weeks with the newest products available, photos, and links to our website. You can unsubscribe at any time and it's a great way to learn about the products we have after the farmer's market season is over."

The sign-up for can be very simple -- I just made one up last week for a conference using an Excel spreadsheet and asked for the following information:

• Name
• Email address
• Demo (y/n)
• Mailing list (y/n)
• Signature

Although collecting the customer's name is not required, it is nice to collect that information to help your handwriting analysis as you decipher the email address. Most of the time people write their information down in a hurried way and are not thinking to write legibly so you can type the address into your computer, so the more information you collect the better off you are.

I wrote in large text at the bottom of each page: "We will not share your email address with anyone for any reason and you can unsubscribe at any time." Even though you know you are trustworthy and will not share emails with any other organization, many customers are wary of giving away their email addresses so remind them over and over that they can unsubscribe and that you only use the information for your farm.

To really increase the size of your mailing list and customer satisfaction, give some extra value to people that opt in to your list. Have extra flowers of one variety because you accidentally grew 500 row feet instead of 50? Give each customer a flower when they sign up for the mailing list to say thanks! They will appreciate the flower and you will appreciate the extra email address.

Another good place to collect email addresses is on your website; have a text box and submit button that adds any email entered to your mailing list. This usually takes some advanced skill or software (such as the Small Farm Central service and other options that I will discuss in Part 2) because you are going beyond the capabilities of normal HTML and getting into more advanced programming. A bare bones approach could just encourage visitors to send a message with "SUBSCRIBE" in the subject line to your your email address. This technique can turn a casual web surfer coming to you from LocalHarvest into a regular paying customer.

Legal issues

Unsolicited emails are a big problem on the Internet; Congress has tackled with issue with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act). It all boils down to this fact: you must give the recipients of the email list a mechanism to discontinue all emails from your farm.

This can be as simple as replying to you with "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line or as complex as the way Small Farm Central and other mailing list software works. When someone requests removal from a farm's mailing list, we first check against the database to make sure the email exists. If  it does, we generate a unique link and send it to the address provided. Then the recipient simply clicks the link sent in the email and they are removed. This ensures that the person requesting removal from the list is the owner of the address.

Since your farm mailing list will likely not get huge you probably don't need to read all the laws related to spam, but it is important to follow the basic rules. Penalties can include being labeled a spammer on various spam databases (this means your emails will go to "Junk" instead of the Inbox), having your email account stripped by your service provider, fines, or, most importantly, the loss of customer trust.

Further reading

The CRITICAL Success Factors for E-mail Marketing
Email address harvesting and opt-out: Do the crime, do the time
Discussion board: How do you collect email addresses?
5 Quick Tips on How to Grow Your Email List
Get people to opt in to your email marketing

More next week

Next week I will cover how to get those emails from you to your customer. There is a better way than simply separating each email address with a comma in your normal email client. This will become especially important as you use the techniques described above and your list grows from 50-odd email addresses to many hundreds.