If you send out emails to attract attention to your business, club, blog, charity or other organisation, then you will want to ensure your emails stand the best chance of being open and read. How do you avoid the pitfalls associated with email marketing? Read on to find out what successful email marketing professionals do to ensure their open rates are at least 25% and often well above this figure.
1. Focus on Email Subject Lines
Email marketing is just one of the many ways SMEs and even larger organisations can leverage their digital marketing strategy. Start-up marketing often relies on relatively inexpensive forms of marketing, such as e-mail campaigns. Nevertheless, the success of your email strategy relies on something you cannot always control, namely how often your emails are opened, let alone replied to. Therefore, a good tip is to make your email engaging from the get-go. This means the subject line has to be interesting and thought-provoking without being too quirky. Opt for a tailored subject line for targetted campaigns – what might suit a B2B client won’t necessarily work with B2C consumers, for instance.
2. Measure Your Success
It is no good sending emails out and hoping they will be opened. Unless you are measuring your open rate in some way, you won’t find out what works for you given your sector and customer base. Therefore, the key to obtaining success and improving on it is to find a suitable tool that will inform you exactly what your open rate is. Use the email check on emailvalidation.io as a first good step. With it, you will soon see which emails are more successful than others, helping you to determine what works so you can continue to tweak future emails for more and more success as you proceed. Without measuring yourself, you’re quite simply in the dark.
3. Provide Great Written Content
Another good idea is to make sure the body of your email contains something readable and engaging. When you send an email, the recipient won’t necessarily be engaged even if they do open it. What you need is an approach that is straightforward and to the point without being too solemn and businesslike. Use easy-to-understand phrases and avoid jargon, even if you are writing for a particular niche sector. Equally, ensure your email isn’t either too long or too short. Good introductory emails are about 100 words long, but follow-up ones can be longer. Avoid slang and shorthand language, such as FYI, that not everyone might understand.
4. Make Careful Use of Images
Emails can contain images, good if you won’t to show and not tell the recipient about what you’re contacting them about. However, large image files may mean your email goes straight into the spam filter bin and never gets seen. If you use an image, scale it down so it is just a few KB in size at most. You can always provide a link to a high-definition image, after all. Linking to video content is also a good idea for people who are interested and want to know more but who can’t be bothered to read your email in full.
5. Be Approachable
Approachability is a hard thing to pull off in an email. Think of approaching someone you don’t know in a showroom or even on the street to make a pitch. Don’t dive in: explain why you’re reaching out and that you won’t take much time. Proceed to explain in brief why paying attention will be beneficial to the recipient and then go on to make your pitch. A good email introduction could start like this: “Sorry for the intrusion in your busy day, but I think you’ll benefit from knowing about our latest product/offer…”
6. Tailor Your Calls to Action
Most good emails end with a call to action (CTA). Typically, this will ask the recipient to get in contact to find out more. However, if you’ve provided links to your website’s product or service pages, then suggest the recipient clicks on these instead. Think about the persona of the persona you are emailing and adjust your CTAs accordingly. Some people need a softer approach while others respond to the fear of missing out and a harder CTA may be more appropriate.
7. Keep it Mobile-Friendly
Finally, check your email before you send it for errors, broken links and spelling. Always check an email you’ve written is mobile-friendly even if you’ve prepared it on a desktop computer or tablet. This will help you to make fine adjustments to the layout. Remember some people’s primary email contact device is their smartphone.
