Delete. How often do you hit that button in your inbox on a daily basis? How many of those emails did you send to die before even reading them?
If you’re on the other end of the equation, you are the business, and your click-through rate (CTR), well, frankly sucks. What’s a marketer to do?
Email marketing remains a major component of digital marketers. More than 100 billion marketing emails are sent out every day! Email marketing is a proven method for getting people to pay attention to and learn more about what you have to offer. Getting people to read those emails can be a real challenge, however, given the sheer number of emails that hit most inboxes on a typical day.
Don't assume social media marketing is the only way to attract new customers. Email marketing may seem like an old-school trick, but do it the right way, and it can be a refreshing lead nurturing tool. According to McKinsey & Company, email is nearly 40% more effective than Twitter and Facebook in acquiring new customers. To boot, a recent study from Nielsen Norman Group reported that 90% of medium consumers preferred newsletters over Facebook updates.
Here are eight tips for making your email marketing strategy successful:
- Use a consistent, recognizable sender address. Readers usually use two things to judge whether to open an email or not: the "From" and the subject line. You want your "From" to clearly identify who you are and where you are from. If at all possible, you need to use the same "From:" for all emails you send out.
- Make your subject line do double duty. Its main job is to get people to open the email up to read it. It should also summarize your email's contents. The subject line needs to be informative, but not too salesy. It needs to be timely, useful, and personal. Don't use the same or similar subject line on all your emails. When people start to recognize a subject line, it has lost its appeal.
- Keep the email content simple. Most consumers will not spend more than 5 to 10 seconds scanning an email to see if they want to read more. Make sure you keep the content to the point. Use bullet points when it make sense. Use headings to break up content. Use short sentences and paragraphs. This is especially true for newsletters.
- Cover all the bases in the email. The reader wants to know who, what, where, why, when, and how. If you are vague or leave out pertinent details, you will not get the click-through rate you were counting on.
- Keep your language personable, but professional. You want to make a personal connection with the reader. Yet, using too much informal language or slang can turn off many people. Suit the language that you use to your target audience. If your target audience is a typical consumer with a high school education, do not use language that only a college grad would understand.
- Add a clear call to action to the email. What do you want the reader to do when they read your email? You may want them to download an eBook, check out your latest product, or catch your new video. Make sure you communicate what you want them to do and give them ways to do it. Give them a landing page to go to next, and don’t forget the thank you page.
- Personalize your emails. Instead of broadcasting the same email to everyone on your list, send out a more personalized email to a subset. For example, if a consumer has expressed more interest in a particular brand or product line, send them emails focused on their interest. Locality is another way to personalize email content. This is where your company’s buyer personas can really come into play.
- Make emails mobile-friendly. According to the US Consumer Device Preference Report: Q4 2013 from Movable Ink, 66% of emails were opened on a smartphone or tablet. What does that tell you? If you don’t make your emails responsive, you can kiss a good CTR goodbye.
If you read this blog and didn’t toss it like that stale email that just popped into your inbox, thank you. And we hope you walked away with these two points: 1) Email marketing isn’t dead. 2) But it will be if you aren’t genuine and fresh. Remember, nobody likes a spammer.
