If you’ve been on the internet for a hot minute, you know that people are done reading content that doesn’t resonate with them (this includes your customers).
- They want to skip the clickbaity email subject lines and stick with the personalized ones.
- They want to bid adieu to vague content and instead opt for valuable thoughts and ideas.
- They want to get back the time spent reading boring emails and instead consume information that matters.
So, how can you make their dreams come true? This article will teach you how to craft email campaigns that resonate with your subscribers and help you achieve your business goals.
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Understanding the Difference Between Newsletters and Email Marketing
Before we discuss how to engage with your email recipients, we want to first touch upon the differences between email newsletters and marketing emails. Marketers, especially those in a startup setting, sometimes confuse the two.
Newsletters are basically the product itself. That is to say, the only thing you’re promoting with the newsletter is the content you upload in it (nothing less, nothing more). Email marketing campaigns, on the other hand, are developed to promote a product/service you offer.
While it seems like a tiny mistake to confuse the two, it can cause misaligned expectations between you and your reader, which can affect you greatly and become one of the underlying reasons why your subscribers aren’t engaging with your campaigns.
Tips on How To Craft Campaigns That Resonate With Your Subscribers
For this piece, we’re skipping some of the most-discussed topics (i.e., developing compelling subject lines, personalizing content, segmenting your target audiences, etc.), and are instead focusing on the practical tips you can leverage to create campaigns that actually engage your subscribers and email lists.
1. Ask Customers What They Want To Read
When we first begin crafting email marketing campaigns, most of us are playing a guessing game about what our subscribers want to read and what they don’t, and this is what ends up becoming a fatal flaw.
Our recommendation would be to directly ask customers which industries they belong to and what kind of content they’d like to read right before they sign up.
Even if your subscribers have been hanging around for a long time, you can still use survey tools or run polls to gather this data from them or directly ask them about their pain points.
If you’re looking for a reference, here’s one from Vero — they directly ask their new subscribers about topics they’d like to read about.
2. Leverage Your Tech Stack To Find Customer Sentiments and Topics
Alternatively, if you’re not getting the answers you need by directly asking subscribers what they want to read about. Or if that strategy isn’t for you, you can leverage tools in your tech stack to uncover customer conversations and sentiments like using contact centers as a service (CCaaS) to keep in touch with them
You can use social media listening tools to know what conversations are drumming around your brand and the topics you cover — more importantly, which topics see the most traction. Or tap into the power of brand sentiment analysis tools to find out why customers interact with you.
For example, with the help of such tools, Hims & Hers discovered that customers often interacted with them to learn more about wellness and health-related topics.
So, they capture the hearts and attention of their subscribers by writing and sharing topics that genuinely interest and help their subscribers. From addressing anxiety and stress to providing resources for personalized healthcare, Hims & Hers leaves no stone unturned in their email content offerings.
CRM (customer relationship management) tools also help shed insights into patterns and behaviors.
For example, with the help of real estate CRM software, realtors can now replicate the language their customers use and create marketing materials and emails written in the same way.
This level of personalization ensures that your campaigns resonate with your audience, resulting in higher click-through rates and increased customer loyalty. What’s not to love?
3. Use Interactive Content To Engage Your Subscribers
Let’s be honest — no one likes boring content, even if it’s on a topic we care about.
Your customers are the same. You can send them educational content, personalize subject lines, add valuable information, and go through the whole shebang, but if your emails aren’t structured well and if they’re not interactive, your customers aren’t going to like it.
So, what can be done instead, you ask? The answer is simple: You invest in interactive content.
This means tons of images, GIFs, page breaks, white lines, visuals, live closed captions, embeds, and even emojis.
Pro tip: You can also consider using heat maps to understand how your subscribers consume content and what details they engage most with. According to that, you can then craft and structure your emails.
4. Use Human Psychology To Intrigue Them
Human psychology defines how, when, and why your subscribers read your emails. So, it makes sense to use it to your advantage to make your subscribers read your emails for longer and convert.
For example, some of the tips that Katelyn Bourgain, a marketer who specializes in human psychology, recommends applying are:
- Using specific time as opposed to common time (e.g., “Sale ends in 37.5 hours,” as opposed to “Sale ends in 50 hours”).
- Not giving the subscriber thousands of choices and limiting to a few options.
- Using names when referring to customers.
- Adding mystery items to make your customers curious (e.g., “Free mystery gift if you buy an item today”).
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5. Refine Your Strategy With A/B Tests and Analytics
Last but not least, all email marketing campaigns need to go through the cycle of updates and revisions, but the only things that’ll help you move in the right direction are A/B tests and customer analytics.
Leverage your email marketing tools to understand send times, find customer personas, segment your email clients, and more. Leverage all the insights from these tools to improve your conversion rates.
Find Other Insights on StartupNation
If you own, manage, or are part of a startup, one thing’s guaranteed — there are many experiences to learn from each passing day.
StartupNation is here to help — we have the insight and information to help you grow your startup (consider us your digital mentor) and supercharge your email marketing strategies.
Are you ready to win over your email subscribers with a successful email marketing campaign?
Avoid promotional emails and stick to personalized emails, and you’re already ahead of the game. Here’s to your most effective email campaign yet!
