Article at a glance:
- Choose the right platform for you
- Dodge the spam filter
- Pay attention to design
- Format and organization are important
- Responsive design is a must
- Text matters, but don’t overdo it
- Get your timing right
- Integrate social media
- Make sure you’ve got a killer subject line
- Customize your content for each audience
- Test your methods
- Don’t let spelling mistakes derail your legitimacy
- Turn leads into conversions with a call to action
- Find your tone and voice
- Keep researching
It’s rare to find a business that doesn’t use email as a primary communication tool these days—email is inexpensive, it’s versatile, and it’s easily measurable. As you settle down with your cup of dark roast in the morning, your email inbox is likely the first thing you navigate to.
While social media has certainly taken center stage over the last few years, when you put it head to head with email, the statistics don’t lie. Here’s one to consider: There are currently 4.48 billion people using email, while Facebook boasts 1.7 billion and Twitter claims 313 million followers. Here’s another: 58 percent of online consumers report checking their email as the first online activity of the day, while 11 percent check Facebook first. Think for a moment about your own email habits: You likely have a business account and at least one personal account—maybe even more than one. In fact, by the end of 2021, it’s predicted there will be more than 4.1 billion email users worldwide. Those numbers strongly suggest email is still a thriving marketing channel, and paying attention to the trends is essential.
Business leaders might suspect that email is on its way out and start looking to other platforms to ply their goods and services. The fact is, email marketing is far from dead—it’s a very cost-effective, measurable, and accessible way to build your business, but you have to do it right. Think of this as your Galaxy’s Guide to Email Campaigns—it’ll get you where you want to go.
Enhance Your Email Marketing Campaigns
1. Choose the right platform for you
Once you’re up to speed on all of the email marketing essentials, it’s time to find a platform that suits your needs. Businesses should evaluate their requirements by themselves, or with the assistance of an agency partner, in order to determine the level of service that best fits their needs. Will you need a platform that is capable of sending out a variety of emails to a variety of constituents every day, while posting content to your blog and social media channels at the same time? Do you need professional consulting services to help you figure out the best types of emails to send? Make sure you consider pricing during your search as well.
Having the right tools in hand—like partnering with an agency or purchasing reputable email-marketing software—ensures that you’ll be able to do everything possible to generate the most leads and better your campaign’s performance.
2. Dodge the spam filter
Emails may look simple when compared with websites, but the process of designing and building an HTML email that gets past spam filters and looks good once it arrives in subscribers’ inboxes is far more complex than it seems.
These days, companies boast sophisticated filters that can detect when emails are being sent to a large number of people at once, and roughly 21 percent of permission-based emails—or emails that are sent to a user who opted in to an email list—sent by authorized email marketers end up in junk folders, according to ReturnPath.
The parameters of what constitutes spam have grown over the years as well, so if you’re running your company’s email marketing campaigns, you should be very familiar with the CAN-SPAM Act, updated March 2017. It’s a law that sets the rules for how commercial emails can be sent, and it establishes requirements for commercial messages while spelling out the penalties for violations. Make sure you’re sending out content that people will actually find useful, and you’ll be just fine!
If your emails are never read, it’s going to be pretty tough to achieve your performance goals and sustain long-term continued growth.
3. Pay attention to design
A lot of the time and effort you spend crafting your email campaign should go towards the look and feel of your email. Clean, clutter-free, elegant design drives action these days, and you’ll be shocked at the huge difference a well-designed email makes to your ROI.
Here are some key tips for creating attractive emails:
- Use a font size that’s easily read on a small screen
- Make sure your calls to action are prominent and easily clickable
- Use a single column layout so it can be read on screen without having to scroll
- Make sure you have a good balance of appropriately-sized images to text
- If images are disabled on a device, be sure you have descriptive alt text where an image would be. The style may be lost, but the substance is still there
If your budget allows for it, hire a graphic designer to create some email templates that are unique to your business. Not only will this help your emails stand out from the run-of-the-mill templates that come free with email marketing services, but you’ll have a much better chance at securing a professionally created and well-designed look and feel that has the potential to reach the largest number of leads possible.
4. Format and organization are important
You can have a beautifully designed email, but if it’s confusing to navigate, your readers won’t understand your message—or waste time trying to decipher it. Highlight your key points using headlines, bullets, and numbered lists. Once you’ve got people reading your message, you’ve got seconds to get them to take action. Don’t make readers search for your point! Draw their eyes straight to the meat. Multiple fonts, too many photos, and copy that doesn’t make sense or is scattered all over the place will simply overwhelm your audience.
Some readers, and more importantly, some email programs, prioritize HTML messages. Be sure to include a text-only version of your message to help bypass spam filters. With the right format and organization, a quick glance at your email will easily capture a wider spread of readers and generate an increase in leads.
5. Responsive design is a must
Mobile email will soon account for up to 75 percent of email opens, according to Email Monday’s “Ultimate Mobile Email Stats” in 2017. That number is growing, and you can see just how many of your subscribers are using mobile devices by checking your own email marketing analytics. Due to the huge uptick in users viewing emails on devices instead of desktop, it’s absolutely essential that you make sure your email design is responsive.
A responsive email is one that is built with a structure that senses and appropriately reacts to the device accessing it. If you’re viewing the email on a desktop computer, it will stretch and adjust to fit the entire screen. However, if you’re using a mobile phone, a responsive email will shrink to fit the screen and stack the content for quicker, clearer access to relevant information. Keep in mind that there are certain size and design restrictions required for email marketing campaigns to translate well to mobile, and it’s worth hiring an agency to help you figure out the complexities that go into coding a responsive website. The use of responsive design in your email marketing campaign can double its effectiveness. That is certainly the mark of an efficient campaign.
6. Text matters, but don’t overdo it
Don’t try to cram a novel into an email. If you have too much content for one email, think about turning it into a series of emails to create more buzz and excitement amongst your readers.
Know what you need to say and just say it. Keep it short, easy to read and understandable. To that end, stay away from industry jargon. The goal here is boosting leads, and no one wants to look at an email that reads the same as all the others.
Perhaps an introductory email would be a good way to provide an overview of the product or events, and why the reader should be interested. After that, you can hook the reader by promising more information in future emails or by linking to other sections of your website or blog. Keep your readers engaged by making your website “sticky”—meaning you’re successfully pointing them to different areas of the site and gently nudging them down the conversion funnel.
7. Get your timing right
Click around the internet, and you’ll quickly discover different studies claiming different days and times for prime email performance. CoSchedule’s guide claims that Tuesday is the best day, while OptinMonster declares Thursday as the winner.
What’s important is that you test and assess your own data, as your audience might be different from the masses. Most email marketing services come with insights and analytics, so you can easily see the best day and time to send your communications. Once you see the right numbers rolling in on your analytics dashboard, you can rest assured that the right numbers will probably start rolling in when it comes to your company’s sales performance too.
8. Integrate social media
People who opt to receive your emails are more likely to act on the content—whether it’s liking your Facebook page, connecting on LinkedIn, or following you on Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat. Social media can easily be used to engage prospects and get them to sign up for email campaigns. Email marketing can then drive traffic and generate sales.
Adding social buttons into your emails makes them very easy to share, so the first, and easiest, step is to simply include your social icons in emails. People can click and be taken directly to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social pages. Just as easy is adding a social sharing button (such as “Tweet this”) to each piece of content within your email. Be sure to make the social media icons prominent enough for users to notice and take action.
9. Make sure you’ve got a killer subject line
Want to write effective email marketing copy that will make your audience jump? Start with a subject line just like that! It’s specific, speaks directly to your reader, and gives them an immediate reason to take action. You also want your reader to feel intrigued enough to open the email, so keeping things short, snappy, and creative is also crucial. Too many marketing emails are dropped directly into the trash folder without ever being opened due to a lackluster subject line. According to ReturnPath, 65 characters long is the ideal length for an email subject line, which is actually longer than the average subject line of 41-50 characters.
Campaign Monitor recommends you keep your preview text—a snippet of copy pulled in from the body of your email designed to improve click-through rate—to around 40-50 characters, but this all depends on the device and email client the reader is using. For example, if a reader is opening the email from their Gmail account on a desktop computer, they’ll be able to view up to 70 characters in a subject line. However, if they’re looking at your email on their Android phone, they’ll only be able to read 27 characters. Try both and check out your analytics afterward: the answer will reveal itself in the data.
10. Customize your content for each audience
Are you sending emails to millennial women who are busy building a startup business? Or is your audience older and spending weekends at the lake house up north?
Make sure your content appeals to the demographics and habits of your consumers and is designed with them in mind. Will bright, neon colors catch the eye of your readers? Is good photography important to your audience? In order to effectively target specific people in your audience, you have to define those specific audiences first. Create personas for each of your audience segments, and get specific about the details: What motivates them? What are their goals? What do they care about?
Consider who you’re targeting, and make sure your email campaigns hit the nail on the head.
11. Test your methods
Once you’ve sent your campaign, it’s time to start analyzing your data. Tracking open and click-through rates is a good start, but if you really want to optimize your campaigns, consider setting up A/B tests to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Instead of saying, “This isn’t working,” imagine that you could identify which element wasn’t working and you could use it to optimize and improve future campaigns. Do you get more click-throughs on a certain day? Are some of your links never clicked at all? Do you have better luck with open rates when you use shorter subject lines instead of longer ones? Test your results, learn from your data, and adapt accordingly if your lead generation efforts are suffering.
12. Don’t let spelling mistakes derail your legitimacy
Always double check your spelling and grammar. At least one other set of eyes should carefully read every email before you hit the send button.
Misspelled words and incorrect information say you’re either careless or rushed, and you don’t want to give the impression that your team is guilty of either one. Make sure whomever is writing your emails is skilled in spelling and grammar, and make spell checking a part of your strategy from the get go. Try the Grammarly app or browser plugin to automatically see where mistakes are made. The details are important, and a t perfectly constructed email provides a professionalism that will amplify your brand and boost your performance.
13. Turn leads into conversions with a call to action
Your email can be targeted, timely, and pretty, but if the content doesn’t resonate with the reader and give them direction, it’s headed for the digital trash can.
Whether the goal is to drive traffic, sell products, or get feedback, the reader should know what it is and how they can do it within a few seconds. If you’re a clothing retailer looking to sell products, include an offer or link to the product’s online store so that the reader’s path to your intended destination is as seamless as possible.
Give your readers multiple ways to take action. Say things like, “Click here for the rest of the article!” or, “Buy today to take advantage of this special offer.” It could be as basic as prompting them to share on their social media channels. Asking people to share and connect can help you build a community around your messaging. Let them do the work for you and give them the opportunity to share the love. Adding a “share with a friend” feature or social media sharing buttons gives your message greater reach. More reach means more leads, and at the end of the day, that’s the main goal, right?
14. Find your tone and voice
Is your company conversational, snappy, and open? Or is your organization more buttoned up and very professional? Figure out which adjectives describe your company, and then find your sweet spot in tone and voice.
It’s important your emails are consistent and on brand, so identifying how the text, photos, design, and structure flow together is important. Customers will recognize your product if you have cohesive and identifiable style that they can latch onto.
15. Keep researching
The internet is chock-full of helpful, intelligent resources that can assist you in making smart decisions about your next email marketing campaign. Keep investigating, and experiment with all the different options. Here’s a list of useful guides to get you started:
Email marketing guides
- MailChimp’s “Resources Library”
- OptinMonster’s “Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Beginners”
- Campaign Monitor’s “Getting Started with Email Marketing”
- Hubspot’s “Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing”
Email marketing service comparisons
- PC Magazine’s “The Best Email Marketing Software of 2017”
- Business News Daily’s “Best Email Marketing Software 2017”
Guides to avoiding spam filters
- MailChimp’s “How to Avoid Spam Filters”
- Hubspot’s “A Marketer’s Guide to Email Deliverability”
- Inc.com’s “5 Rules: How to Avoid a Spam Filter”
Take It to the Next Level
So, you’ve learned the tricks and tips; you’ve found the tools and the experts; you’re set to plan, design, develop, and deliver high-performing email campaigns. Maybe you’ve even started integrating email into cross-channel marketing campaigns. If so, congratulations!
Not only will your adept approach at email marketing enable you to increase revenue for your company, but now you can confidently say you have the tools to make a plan that will turn your projected ROI into a reality.
All of the above components point toward the same goal: generate more leads. If you’re motivated by improvements in sales performance and driven by an increase in demand for your organization’s products and services, a smart, snappy, and well-functioning email marketing campaign can get you there. Just remember that the world of email marketing evolves rapidly. It’s essential to stay on top of the latest trends as they emerge, so that you and your campaigns can evolve and elicit continued growth.
