Which Smart Phone is Best?

It’s 2012 – Five years after the iPhone arguably freed mobile phones from the carrier constraints of proprietary software, smartphones have captured our imagination and our attention. According to a study by Google and market research firms Ipsos and Sterling, 38% of our daily media interactions happen on our smartphones.

The natural accessibility of our smartphones – their compact size and a practical usefulness that rivals a Swiss army knife – also lends itself, apparently, to us acting on the spur of the moment. A head-turning 81% of mobile shopping is caused by spontaneous urges. That’s not a number you can sweep under the rug and pretend doesn’t matter.

If you’re in the business of business, this means mobile marketing should be a growing, if not high-level, priority. Marketing that understands where your customers are and how they respond will yield the highest returns. To find that sweet spot, you should test multiple channels and then target your audience to deliver messages that they are relevant to them.

Writing the Best Email Subject Line

The subject line of an email is the key. This one sentence, read and digested within milliseconds, determines whether your email message will be opened – or not. So, it’s critical that you tweak and optimize your one-liner for maximum effectiveness.

1. Get your reader’s attention. Consciously anticipating your audience’s interests or needs should dramatically improve your email open rates. Your subject line doesn’t need to sell your product – that’s the job of the body copy of your message. It just has to get the reader to do one simple thing: Open your email.

2. Keep it to the point and brief. Everyday people are bombarded with email.To stand out from the crowd, make your subject line a concise four to five words and under 55 characters. Also, be as honest with your message as possible. Don’t be so clever as to trick the reader into opening your message, because if your email is misleading and doesn’t meet your reader’s expectations, they’ll be less likely to open your emails in the future.

3. Don’t recycle the subject line. Reusing the same subject line for your email newsletter will lead to boredom and the eventual death of your open rates. Avoid or postpone this sad fate by being original. Don’t be an imitation, especially of yourself.

4. Shun these bad words. Spam filters can’t be helped, but you can adjust your game plan to get your message through this defensive line. Topping the list of verboten words includes perennial spam villain “free” followed by “credit” and “home”, according to Yahoo’s Mail Visualization tool.

5. Build credibility. This isn’t something you can do overnight with one subject line, but it plays a big part of the reason why someone would open an email. The first or second thing a person will consider in deciding whether to open an email is the from address. Is the email from a trusted source? If not, the email has already failed. On the other hand, if your email address has your reader’s trust, you’ve already won half the battle.