5 ESSENTIAL EMAIL MARKETING TIPS
With 77% of consumers preferring to receive marketing content via email, the power of email marketing cannot be ignored. This said, it pays to do it right. After all, the point of email marketing is to boost click through and conversion rates. Paying attention to the following essential tips can leverage your email marketing campaign and boost your bottom line.
1. Subject Lines Matter
The subject line is your virtual ‘foot in the door’ when it comes to email marketing. Did you know that 33% of consumers open your email based on the subject line alone? So keep it short – 49 characters or less is ideal – and scintillating, but don’t summarise.
Research has shown that teasers work best, for example: “Why bananas are the best fruit ever” or “Want to improve purchasing power?”. Use trigger words that resonate with your consumers and focus on how you can benefit them. Including words like “you”, “your” and “secrets” is highly effective while words like “free’, “sex”, “video” and “sample” will most likely just land your email in the spam box.
2. Make it Mobile Friendly
It’s best practice to send out both html and text based emails, but if you do decide to go with html-only emails, you should at the very least piggyback a text-only version onto your send. Many consumers prefer to view their emails as text only and with 36% of all emails being opened using a mobile device (up to 64% in the case of decision makes on the go), you don’t want your marketing campaign to fall down on this basis.
3. Get Personal
Consumers are people too and addressing them by name creates a positive association with your brand. It makes them feel like more than just another anonymous subscriber. Emails using personalised subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened and read, and personalised content goes a long way to boosting click through and conversion rates, yet it remains an untapped opportunity in many email marketing campaigns.
Effective personalisation depends on digging into the data provided at sign up as well as consequent purchasing or action history and using it to deliver email that is relevant to the consumer on a personal level.
4. Get to the Point and Provide Links
Less is more when it comes to email marketing. Your consumer’s attention span and time are in short supply so use concise paragraphs. Make use of colour, highlighting and trigger words to ensure the salient points can be easily picked out. And, most importantly, include obvious links – at least one in the introductory paragraph – to your landing page so the consumer can easily follow through on a call to action.
5. Optimise Template Dimensions and Do a Test Run
Again it is about optimising your marketing campaign so be aware that your email should be designed to work within a 600 x 200 pixel space not including images. How your email looks in these dimensions is how it will appear to your target readers. It also pays to run your email through test accounts using the top email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and so on). This will help you check for any formatting and delivery rate errors and correct them prior to sending the email out to your full mailing list.