Do you find your email sends aren’t getting the results you desire? Look no further for some handy tips to get your readers scrolling and clicking in no time!
1. Subject lines
There is no point in investing time and effort in perfecting your email content if most of your recipients aren’t even going to open the email. So how to best get that first all-important click? Think about the benefits your email is offering, words that might catch your target audience’s attention. Consider the sort of subject lines that work for you as a consumer – what makes you engage? Use the recipient’s name if you can. Make it snappy enough to be seen on mobile. Most importantly, give it a bit of hype and anticipation!
There are also some great tools available to test and optimise your subject lines. Check out this helpful blog post by HubSpot: 12 Subject Line Tester Tools to Boost Your Email Open Rate (hubspot.com)
2. Deliverability
It may be a bit dry and technical, but this is important to make sure your emails are getting to inboxes, you need to make sure your emails are optimised for good delivery rates. Sending your emails from a recognised domain and using a CRM tool is a good start.; you are more likely to pass the test for the email service providers to let your content through to their registered users. You also need to keep your data clean: Firstly remove from future sends any emails addresses that bounce back. Secondly set up an easy unsubscribe process because any time your email gets marked as spam by the recipient count against you as a legitimate sender. It might feel counter-intuitive but there’s really no point hanging on to outdated email addresses for the vanity of a big data list! Finally, try to keep your email campaign volumes regular and consistent; erratic sends will trigger alarm bells and can have negative effects on your deliverability rates.
If you are having real problems with deliverability you will need to investigate the root cause and how to fix it, this can be a complex area and you may need specialist support.
3. Content
Before you begin creating your emails you need to establish a plan; what messages are you going to send, to whom, how often? Think about your target audience and what the meaningful points are in their relationship with you. Decide on the goal of your email marketing campaign. Are you trying to maintain awareness? Improve consideration? Gain short-term sales?
Depending on the goal, you should adjust your content plan. For example, you might want to aim for:
• Aspirational: include lots of great imagery and emotive language
• Helpful & informative: a trust-building communication with useful information for the recipient
• Sales-led: conveying a time-limited offer to convert to sale
Once you’re clear on your goals keep them in focus while you look at the email tone of voice, language, your use of colour and imagery.
4. Design
Is the design of your email on Brand in terms of font, colours and imagery? Is the layout clean and easy on the eye? Does it look engaging and likely to spark interest?
Making sure the content is aligned to your brand look and feel will help with the overall marketing of your brand; consistency builds trust which must be one of the key goals of your marketing content. When your readers feel like they know you from recognising your communications they are more likely to trust and like you and more likely to convert to sale.
5. Readability
We are all short of time, it’s a busy old world out there! As well as making the content useful and engaging, it must be easy to read. Cut out jargon, don’t use flowery language. Keep your sentences short. Make sure your spelling and grammar are on point.
6. Targeting and personalisation
Using a CRM system to segment your database to get the right message to the right person at the right time is the best way to make sure your email is tailored to the end user. Get this right and your audience will start to trust that any email from your business is likely to be relevant. They will naturally take more notice. You should also consider personalisation of content within the email; at the simplest level this would be including the recipient’s name, but at its most sophisticated this can mean a content plan which tweaks wording and images based on the segments of your database.
7. Timing
Think about your message and when it might make the most sense to send it. Should it coincide with a real-world event? Is there a time that will make the most sense for the recipient? Test out days, dayparts, even days of the month! It might only make a small difference but it’s about fine-tuning all the cogs in the wheel to improve your overall performance.
8. Call to action
Are you clear about what you want your reader to do next (and why)? Without a direction or a clear indication as to the benefits, it is unlikely you will get a click on your website. Make sure your call to action is clear and succinct, and if needs be that there’s a reason to click. What will your customer’s click be rewarded by?
9. Landing page
Once they have responded to your prompt to click, of equal importance is the journey through to the landing page; this needs to match with the reader’s expectations, otherwise, they are likely to ‘bounce’ straight off again. Test out the user journey and optimise the experience so that it is easy for the user to see what they need to do next – don’t make them have to work too hard!
10. Measure, test and learn
And yes, you’ve guessed it! One of the major benefits of digital marketing is how accountable it can be. Don’t just send and forget… measure the results and use the insights. It will take time to establish the benchmarks for engagement rates from your email marketing. Make sure you are measuring all the correct performance indicators; bounce, open, click, and conversion rates. Investigate industry reports which can help with what you should be striving for, and then conduct some testing to learn how your engagement rates improve by adjusting the elements we've described here. Soon your email marketing will be getting the results you need for your business.
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