Emails are an easy way to quickly get in front of your current or potential customers. However, a hastily prepared email not only turns off the people receiving it, but it also reduces the effectiveness of your email. There are many ways you can get more from your email marketing efforts.
Use the ideas below to attract customers, build relationships and show that you want to make your customer’s lives a little easier.
Make CTAs clear
Business 101 tells us that the CTA (or call to action) needs to be seen to be effective. You likely follow this rule when designing new pages for your website, but it can be easy to forget when putting together a marketing email.
Luckily, the same CTA rules apply to emails and landing pages:
- Make it easy to see—preferably above the fold
- Put it in multiple places. Add a CTA at the top, middle and bottom, if possible
- Make it easy to understand, related to the content and compelling. For example, when sending a fall retail email about new products and sales for the fall season, the CTA could be: “Save on your new fall favorites now!”
CTAs could be in the form of a button or a link—buttons may stand out more, depending on what you’re asking the reader to do.
Optimize email marketing for mobile
A whopping 71 percent of people delete an email immediately if it doesn’t load properly, according to findings by Litmus. If you’re not optimized for mobile, your email will head straight to the dreaded trash bin. Not to mention, poorly designed emails provide a negative experience for current and potential customers or clients.
If that’s not enough of a reason to optimize for mobile, remember that millennials are the mobile generation, preferring devices like phones and tablets to the traditional desktop. With millennials slowly taking up a larger portion of the market, it’s critical that you are able to get and keep their attention through mobile optimization.
Use the mobile preview feature of your email platform to make sure every email sent loads properly. You can dive into the data as well to optimize for a specific brand of phone (iOS vs. Android, for example), if you find that an overwhelming number of users open with that type.
Also on StartupNation.com: Tools to Make Your Email Marketing Campaigns More Successful
Segment your lists
Personalization is the name of the game with email, and luckily you can make this happen quickly and easily by simply segmenting your lists. The way that you segment will be determined by your needs. If you’re a national business, you may want to start by segmenting via region or state. If you’re a local business, it would be wise to segment by need, items/services/packages purchased, or previous interaction.
Once the segmenting is done, which most email platforms allow you to do, just choose the correct segment for each email you send.
Be consistent
Help customers recognize your company by staying on brand within your emails. This means choosing imagery that makes sense for your style, keeping a logo in the same place every time (perhaps the top of the page), and sticking to the same language you use on your website and social media pages. People recognize the world’s most famous logos, theme songs and jingles for a reason.
Provide more value
Don’t just blast your customers with sales emails. Send them a variety of emails that also provide value outside the product or service that you sell. This is an easy one to accomplish, because there are many types of emails you can send, most of which not only benefit your customer, but your business as well. Here are a few to add to your roster:
Content-based: You spend a lot of time creating your blog content. Get more from it by sending content emails once a week, month, etc. I was able to drive close to 2,500 page views in one day, via email, with a monthly content email I used to send out.
Product updates: Customers want to know what’s going on with the brands they love. Use email as a way to tell them about new products (even things that are in the works) to build anticipation.
Resources: I used to send one free printable download a month to our teacher user base and the open rates were always much higher than others, at 45 to 65 percent almost every time. Consider your audience and what they would think is valuable. If possible, make the resources yourself so you can add your logo, as well.
Track different types of emails
If you’re sending different types of emails, track them all separately. This will help you know if one is more successful than the other. Perhaps your content emails are driving more leads than your sales emails—you can learn from this data to be more effective with every email you send.
Put a name to the email
A name, as opposed to “Business Tech Team” can make all the difference in your email success. Steven Macdonald, digital marketing manager of SuperOffice, told CIO that 64 percent of subscribers open an email based on who the email is from. Something generic is a turn-off and shows a lack of personalization.
Use this to your advantage by having the same name assigned to the same type of email every time. After a year of sending content emails from my name, I was getting emails from customers asking me for industry advice and tips. They came to see my name as synonymous with new information about their jobs and industry, which makes my emails more valuable going forward.
If you’re taking time to send marketing emails, spend a few extra minutes ensuring that they’ll be effective. While these tips won’t be right for every business, consider which ones are, and how you can use them to get more from your email marketing efforts.
