12 Tips To Help Your Marketing Emails Produce the Desired Result
For years various so-called marketing experts have been claiming that email marketing is dead. If you drill down into why people make that claim, you’ll probably find that they’re promoting some new best marketing tool. But, according to a survey commissioned by Marketing Sherpa, 72 percent of U.S. adults prefer that communications with companies occur through email. The real problem with email marketing isn’t the medium itself; it’s the way businesses use it. Here are 12 actionable tips that can help your marketing emails produce the desired result:
1. Maintain a Strong Email List.
Any email marketing program is only as good as the list of subscribers you’re sending your email to. So your first priority must be to grow and maintain a strong email list. According to HubSpot, email lists degrade at a rate of 22.5 percent per year. So it’s essential that you keep growing your list by at least that rate, just to stay even.
2. Develop Engaging Content Ideas
Every good email marketing campaign begins with good content ideas. No matter how much time and energy you put into creating email content around a bad idea, it’s time and energy wasted. Regardless of which medium you’re using to publish a piece of content, it’s essential that your content be engaging, so invest ample time in content ideation.
3. Create Intriguing Email Subjects
Here’s a great little tip about creating intriguing email subjects: the process is guided by the same principles as blog post and article headlines. In the email world, your subject is what makes people want to open the email. Of course, just like any other marketing-related topic, there are endless articles and blog posts out there about creating compelling headlines. A good starting point is Neil Patel’s 3 step guide to writing powerful headlines.
4. Write Compelling Body Copy
A huge mistake many email marketers make is creating a really intriguing subject, then following that with lackluster body copy. They apparently assume that if the reader opens their email, they’re subconsciously committed to reading the message. The truth is, the opposite is probably true – a compelling subject creates a subconscious expectation that the message be compelling too. A great resource to get you started creating copy that’s based on sound principles is Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins.
5. Personalize Your Message
No one likes feeling as though they’re being marketed to so it’s important that you create an email that makes the reader feel as though you’re speaking to them one on one. And we’re not talking about the standard “Dear {first-name}” feature of your autoresponder. We’re talking about personalization that speaks to the reader’s specific needs.
6. Keep it Brief
The rules for email length differ from blog posts and other forms of online content. Blog posts, etc. should be longer because that’s what search engines like, among other things. Emails are very different. According to Constant Contact, an email with approximately 20 lines of text and 3 or fewer images produces the highest click-through rates.
7. Use Images
Most marketers know that images are a must in blog posts, social media and other online content. Well, the same is true for emails. Imagery in your emails will help boost subscriber engagement and get them to respond to your message. Keep in mind that 3 or fewer images achieve the best results.
8. Use Video
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, how much is a video worth? Well, even if it’s only worth 1,001 words, it’s better than still imagery. Of course, video is really worth much more. So consider using it in at least some of your emails.
9. Always Include a Suitable Call To Action
Imagine for a moment receiving an email with a subject so intriguing, you can’t help but open it, and a message so compelling you immediately want to take action; only to have that motivation thwarted because there’s nothing telling you what that action should be. Sounds silly when you read it, doesn’t it? Of course you have a call-to-action (CTA) in all of your emails. But not all CTAs are suitable for every circumstance. You should select a CTA that will achieve the desired result.
10. Make Your Email Mobile-Friendly
As of June, 2016, 54 percent of emails were viewed on mobile devices, according to Litmus’ email analytics. With the continued growth of mobile usage in general, that email number is bound to grow. Unless you want to risk having more than half your subscribers ignore your email or unsubscribe from your list altogether, you must make your emails mobile-friendly.
11. Segment Your Market
Not all of the customers and subscribers on your email list care about the same things. To reach more people with your email campaigns, you must segment your market based on different characteristics such as interests, need, geographic location, etc. A good place to start, if you’re new to the process of market segmentation, is The Beginner’s Guide To Segmentation and Buyer Personas.
12. Test, Test, and Test Some More
Marketing campaigns must continually evolve if you’re to remain successful. This is especially true in the internet age where trends often come and go in a blink of an eye. Marketers must continually test their email campaigns to maximize their effectiveness. The best way to do that is through A/B testing (aka. Split Testing). A/B testing is a way of determining which of two campaigns promoting the same product or service is most effective in producing the desired result. In an A/B test you create two slight variations of the same campaign and send them to a small percentage of your total recipients. Whichever variation works best is the one you send to your entire email list. Here’s a beginner’s guide to A/B testing that will get you started in the right direction.
In Conclusion:
We’ve given you a lot to think about here, and it may seem a bit overwhelming at first; but you don’t necessarily have to do it all at once. Instead, pick one tip and put it into action this week. Then do another next week, and so on. To learn more about effective email marketing, contact us. We also invite you to check out the resource list below, and follow our blog for more great marketing information.
Additional Resources:
