How to Send the Perfect Marketing Email

Recently, I had the chance to attend a local digital summit and learn about new trends in internet marketing. One of the speakers at the event was from Constant Contact, a popular email marketing platform that allows you to connect with your prospects and clients through email and analyze your results. The speaker gave us some helpful tips and tricks on how to construct the perfect marketing email. As a nearly 14-year old agency, we’re well aware of most of these tactics, but a little refresher doesn’t hurt!

Why Use Email Marketing?

Before you start an email marketing campaign, it’s important to think about why you should utilize the email marketing platform over other digital channels. While search engine marketing and social media marketing can help you capture new customers, email is a more direct form of marketing that allows you directly reach customers that have interacted with your brand.

Whether they give you their email through a contact form or newsletter signup, or they have purchased from you before – the person on your email list knows who your brand is, and you can turn them into a loyal customer.

It’s also important to understand WHY you want to send an email. All too often, we have clients that want to send an email to a list for the sake of sending an email. While it’s a good way to connect with your subscribers, you need to have a thoughtful message and a solid why for your email. If you’re sending an email to your current clients, tailor that message to them. If you’re sending an email to old clients that don’t necessarily use your services now, tailor that message to them. The most important thing to realize is that as consumers, we are bombarded with emails every day. Make sure you’re sending with purpose.

Personalize Your Email Communication

With whatever information you have, segment your list by income, previous interaction, location, gender, education level – then you can tailor the email specifically to what segment the user falls into.

Studies show that 52% of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t personalize communication, personalized emails typically receive an 11% higher open rate, and 27% higher unique click-through rates. Even if you don’t have the information to segment the list by specific demographics, something as simple as putting the user’s name in the subject line will get you better results.

Write A Compelling Subject Line

The content of the email itself is important, but a compelling subject line is what will get people to open it. As previously mentioned, personalizing the communication and including the user’s name in the subject line will help your open rates. Some other helpful ways to spice up your subject line and increase open rate and click-through rates are:

• Ask a question: rather than making a statement, pose a question about to the user, piquing their curiosity and prompting them to open the email.
• Use numbers: lists like “the top 10” or “the 3 things you need to know” catch people’s attention.
• Emojis: in a visual world, using an emoji in your subject line will get you better results. But tread carefully as more and more brands are beginning to use Emojis for the same reason.

Best Practices for Composing an Email

There are a few best practices to remember when putting together your email template:

• Images: Communicate through images, try to limit it to 3 images to not overwhelm the users and make all the images clickable.
• Copy: when it comes to text, less is more. Focus on relevant content – emails with 20 lines of text have the highest click-through rates.
• Familiarity: Make sure to use a familiar name as the sender – your company’s name, or a team member the user would be familiar with, also use branded colors and include your logo in the header to catch the user’s attention
• Call-to-action: Use buttons to create obvious calls to action and limit it to 3 or less. Keep key calls-to-action above the scroll line.

3 Email Marketing Factors to Consider

Once you have created your list, designed your email and composed your subject line – there are a few factors to make sure you’ve considered before you deploy your email campaign.

Three important factors that will affect the success of your campaign are – mobile friendliness, timeliness, and relevancy.

Since the majority of users are checking their email on their phone, your email being mobile friendly is imperative to get users who open it to click and convert.

Relevant and timeliness are important to make the communication feel personalized to the user and can be achieved by keeping your list segmented and setting up automated campaigns.

Get Started on Email Marketing

If you want more information on how email marketing can grow your business, and you can utilize digital marketing to get new customers and get more online leads, contact us at Atilus today!