by Ariella Brown
Subject line: Don’t Forget Your Gift by June 30!When you read that in an email on June 29th, your assumption would be...?
That you'll get a gift with some offer that ends on June 30th. So you may click out of curiosity or out of a feeling of FOMO, two strong incentives to open an email. ( See 7 ways to grab customer attention in subject lines)
What would be your reaction, though, when you discover that the gift referred to is not for you but one that the sender is demanding you send by June 30th?
That's what the New-York Historical Society did for its email campaign as you can see from this screenshot of the email:
Would you be inclined to feel generous and hasten to make this arbitrary cutoff that the organization says is the end of its fiscal year?
Are you using the right KPIs for your campaign?
I have no doubt this subject line generated more than the usual number of opens. Perhaps whoever was tasked with this email campaign was told that's the primary KPI and so resorted to clickbait that turns into a bait-and-switch.
As Stephen Covey said, "Have the end in mind."
It's important to lose sight of the real end goal -- putting people in the frame of mind to want to donate to the organization.
Tricking them into clicking is not likely to do that.
False urgency
Neither is attempting to create a sense of urgency by declaring you're one day away from your fiscal year. If the donation comes in July. it's not going to make much of a difference.
The only end of year the donors care about is the calendar year if they are able to take a tax deduction for the donation. Remember, when you're asking something of someone else, you have to make it center around them and their needs -- not your own timeline.
If you want to use content marketing effectively, you should always be thinking about what is the likely reaction of your target audience to your communication. Failing to do so leads to major fiascos like the one currently experienced by Budweiser and other missteps described in Major Marketing Missteps from Adidas, M&M's and Coke.
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