5 Keys to Email Marketing
Email marketing is a fantastic way of reaching the masses quickly and cost effectively. The trouble is, response rates have decrease over the years due to the overwhelming number of email marketing messages we all receive on a daily basis.
1. Graphic Design in Email Marketing
If you want to stand out from the crowd of email message and have your emails read you need the well designed with graphic enhancements. While it is advisable to use some graphic design in your emails, keep it simple. This will improve loading times and make your email less likely to hit spam filters.
Yes, graphic based email marketing is more likely to be blocked by spam filters but it is usually well worth the small sacrifice. Sure your deliverability may decrease but your responses should go through the roof.
If you want your emailed message to be read you must deliver something different and of value to your readers. Something they will engage with and respond to. There is a science and an art to creating emails that cause a response. These include beefing up your call to action (CTA) and staying away from formatting and content that looks like spam.
2. Avoid Spam Filters in Email Marketing
Prevent your emails from landing in junk folders by staying away from the common antics of spammers. These include using large fonts, red type, numerous exclamation points, blatant keyword repetition, all caps and dubious phrases containing common spam words like free, Viagra and mortgage, among others. If you keep your emails sounding personal, interesting and informative rather than sounding like a sales pitch you should be fine.
3. Emphasise Content in Email Marketing
Just like the subject line, the sidebar can be a vital area of your email marketing message when done well. This allows you to highlight content you want your target audience to pay attention to. This could be links, special offers or your call to action. Make sure this important content can be seen immediately without scrolling. It should be ‘above the fold’ meaning, it should appear on most monitors without scrolling down.
4. Test Your Designs and Messages with Email Marketing
Email marketing is a fantastic tool for market research because you can easily track key statistics of who is clicking links, who is opening the messages and who is unsubscribing.
You should try different combinations of images, graphics and text to see what gets the best response. For example, you could do this by designing one email and duplicating it but change the headline. You can test these two versions against each other by sending them to different people in your email list. By doing so you will soon discover what headline works best for you and roll it out at a larger scale. You could do similar tests for different graphics or different text until you have developed a killer email marketing campaign you know will give the best results. Modifying a single element of your email every time you send them, and see which approach generates the better response from your target audience.
5. Your Email Marketing Call to Action
If you want people to respond to your message you need a powerful call to action. Your email message will never work to its full potential until you prompt your target audience to take the next step. Your call to action should tell your readers what they should do next based on what information you have shared with them. It may be a simple as asking them to visit your website for more information, to call you or to guide them to buy your product on line. Whatever it is, make it clear and direct without being too pushy. Just remember, you will have plenty of other opportunities to market to these people via more email messages so the last thing you want them to do is unsubscribe due to a pushy sales message. Whether it is to download a free excerpt from an ebook, buy a service or subscribe to a newsletter, you should always have a call to action in email marketing.
