Effective marketing strategies mark the boundary between goal setting and goal achieving. Investing time, energy and money (which are all quite the same thing anyway) should be for results. Otherwise, what’s the actual point? Cost-effectiveness is everything in business, placing your brand in power of how it moves and interacts. This article focuses on interaction, specifically email copy. Clients and customers check through their email inboxes daily as a ritualistic obsession over commitment, trend and societal normality. Therefore, effective email marketing is a sure way to increase client/customer success. Following these simple tips can boost your conversion rate and customer communication.
1. Write a Killer Subject Line
Subject lines are one of the first things your clients will view from your emails. If they’re not catchy enough, they will be ignored. On the other hand, don’t market your emailing content using solely titles. If your title gives too much information away, clients will lack the curiosity to open up emails and read further. The best subject lines prevent clients from simply deleting email messages, or even worse, reporting them as spam.
2. Make Your Emails Mobile Friendly
This includes preheader texts, which you should take full advantage of. Preheader text shows the first sentence of your composed email in the notification bars of your readers’ phones, which will be the first content that receivers will see. Eye-catching and relevant content will entice readers to open emails rather than swipe right past them.
Most people carry smartphones around with them for convenience. If emails don’t allow mobile viewing, they are often seen as unimportant and are disregarded. The best emails will support mobile viewing by adapting to the smaller screen size.
Note that only about 10% of pre-made email templates are optimized for phone usage. Preview text shown with emails viewed using mobile devices tells subscribers a bit more about emails with 35 to 140 characters. Maximize this for effective email marketing.
3. Know Your Audience
Knowing that your mailing list are actually people who are interested in your product is very beneficial to you. Simply increasing the sign-up/ conversion rate of your mailing list ends you up with people who will ignore emails, and essentially a waste of effort on your behalf. Focus on the people you know are interested so you can better engage with them.
4. Concentrate on a Singular Goal
Use clear, simple subject lines. They should be straight-forward and plain, though not always. Subject lines that spark immediate curiosity only works on certain demographics. Those in the baby-booming generation are more appealed to with simply subject lines. The subject line is obviously the most important component of emails, which is why you must correctly utilize it.
Try out subject lines that are similar to text messages. These will be easier to remember for your clients and remove the need to develop really long subject lines.
5. Send Re-engagement Emails
Emails opened statistics can be helpful in seeing how many subscribers have not opened emails in a certain period of time. Re-engagement emails is a strategy to get them back on track, with lines questioning if they still wish to receive emails from your brand. If they do not respond to re-engagement emails, they are still not opening your mail, so remove them from the mailing list. If you do not, there is a high chance that their inbox algorithm will enter your mailing address into the spam inbox folder.
When you do remove clients from your mailing list, send another email just in case. Telling non-responsive subscribers that they are being removed can be done with lines such as “sorry to see you go”. This will remind those who are still interested to take action and become involved again.
6. Make Your Calls to Action Hard-Hitting and Plentiful
Incorporate more simplicity into your emails by reducing the overly dramatic styling and designing. Unnecessary designs suggest a lack of quality content. Plain emails with spacious text are the best kind.
A short and sweet call to action is to use a digest. Have two to four topics for clients to choose from. This will also help you figure out what topics receive the most interest.
7. Talk About the Benefits Versus the Features
Talking about the actual content of your products grabs attention. Many email marketers make the mistake of overusing media, such as images. This causes an imbalanced look in emails, increasing the chance of them being flagged as spam. For effective email marketing, ensure images that are used at well-placed and balanced. Also, ensure that they have at least two lines of text per picture.
8. Keep it Short
Prior to email composition, revise three things about your emails: the objective, purpose, and impact. With these in mind to guide you, it will be easier to keep emails to the point with succinct and direct sentences. This will help you achieve the goals you intend to meet with your emails. Adult readers usually skim through emails looking for something worthwhile to catch their attention longer than about 8 seconds, which is why keeping emails very to-the-point is essential. If clients are truly interested in what you are talking about, they will notice you.
Short sentences are also highly impactful. Emails that get straight to the point with succinct sentencing help to sell services and increase client responsiveness. Try a short sentence right at the start and right at the end of your email content, with a maximum word count of nine.
9. Use a Real Person’s Address as the Reply to
Using no-reply or generic company emails is a way to reduce feedback. When customers see a genuine email address, they are more likely to be interested in what you have to say. Make your emails deliberately engaging with questions and multimedia. Encourage your recipients to share your emails with a set number of friends in exchange for a certain privilege such as a discount to use on an online store, or earlier releases of newsletters.
10. Write for the Web
Though you are creating online content, it is people you are writing to, not software or businesses. This means, take advantage of the ability to personalize emails. Connections through communication breed customer loyalty. Appeal to the personal needs of clients, as if they were friends and not money pots.
“Essentially, think with your own mind rather than the company’s mind. Being personal is not done at long-table meetings, it’s done face to face. Try to replicate that as much as you can. Give copies of your emails to trustees such as friends, or even incorporate a blind approach with strangers. Get their feedback and see how you can improve,” says Charles Newhouse, project manager at Australianhelp and Stateofwriting.
Follow a logical structure with short one-idea paragraphs that are similar to web copy.
11. Click-through and Emails Opened Statistics Don’t Matter
There’s a lot more to focus on statistically-speaking than click through and opened emails. Email marketers look at engagement: what buttons and titles get the most attention from traffic. What do customers tend to look at after they actually click through? This information can be very valuable in crafting emails that develop the most effective customer base to interact with your brand.
12. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Keywords Judiciously
“Your email is just like a smaller webpage. Therefore, it is the text and media that are key. Maximizing the use of SEO increases how professional your emails are and also increases their relevance,” says Hilary Melendez, a marketer for Boomessays and Paperfellows. Some of the tips we share in SEO for blogging, can apply to effective email marketing as well.
13. Offer Something of Value, But Do Not Give Any Kind of Sales Pitch
It’s more obvious than you think when sales pitches are incredibly vague. If it’s even slightly noticeable to you, email recipients will be able to see through facades and disguises too. This leads to a lack of trust. Send genuine, crafted emails with relevant sales pitches.
14. Don’t Shout; It’s Spammy
Of course, shouting in emails is metaphorical. This simply refers to being too loud, or even more plainly, emailing too much. Stay light with your emails by emailing only about useful, relevant information. This could be about product progression to get clients involved, or discounts and seasonal offers to get clients more interested.
Also, splitting up your emails into parts where conversations follow a more natural interactive flow, rather than bulking information into single emails, can get more traffic through to your website. Micro conversations are an effective email marketing technique to increase clicks. Familiarize yourself with all features of emails, such as the subject line – include very catching statements here, headers – spark curiosity, and the body of your emails – the place for calls to action.
15. Use Psychology in Email Marketing Strategy
As mentioned, sending your non-responsive subscribers goodbye emails before you remove them from the list is an effective call to action. This is because it works via reverse psychology, making them the ones who have to take action instead of you.
