E-mail Marketing – Tips & Tricks for Better Results
E-mail marketing is nowadays an essential part of any marketing campaign. Regardless of the type of activity you run with your business, e-mail newsletters have proven to not only increase your website traffic, but to also warm up leads, and generate direct sales. However, as with any activity, you must ensure that you are doing it right to achieve the best of results. Check out these simple techniques that will help you increase the number of people reading your newsletter, drive traffic and engagement.
Organize your content and your message
What is it that you want to share with a possible audience? What is your message? What type of content you would like to highlight? Once you know these answers, you will be able to organise both your messaging and your newsletter structure. If you work on many verticals, you can create separate e-mail messages sent regularly to a different target audience. Depending on your business, try to not mix up blog articles with specific company updates. Keep a constant messaging and send those messages to those that are interested in those aspects.
Build a structure database of subscribers
Create special pages on your website, add forms for people to leave their contact details, and explain what type of newsletter they will receive, how the content looks like, how often they’ll receive it, and if possible, let them choose as much as possible the frequency of the newsletters and the topics. This way you know for sure that each e-mail sent is requested by your audience. Advertise your newsletter in Social Media, collect leads and start messaging the right way.
Build an informative newsletter, not just a promotional one
You should keep your newsletter 90% informative and 10% promotional. The more proportional it sounds, the less chances of success in terms of conversions. The market is over saturated with advertising, promotions and sales agents. Try offering people help, assistance, and knowledge, try to make them understand that by using your product or service, you will be covering a missing part of their life. Focus on sending your subscribers educational, relevant, timely information. Unless you have an exciting, big piece of news about your product, service, or company, leave out the promotional parts, and you will see a difference in results.
Subject lines are essential, so are the snippets and introductions. Get creative!
No matter how exciting the information in your newsletter is, if the subject line is unattractive, the e-mail will never be opened.
- Make sure your subject lines comply with any SPAM filtering, as well as the most important filter – your reader. Avoid words such as “act now”, “free”, or “limited time”, using Caps Lock, and excessive punctuation marks. Keep it simple and clean.
- Make them actionable: insert a verb or explain what the user could do with or due to your e-mail. This way, your users will feel the needs of taking an action, or at least will know what they should be doing.
- Personalize – You should also have a friendly and personalize approach as much as possible. Speak to your subscribers as you would speak to a friend. Based on the segmentation that you did, instead of sending a newsletter with a general topic line, try using one personalized by the segment you created.
Make it clear – Put yourself in your reader’s shoe: if you receive that e-mail, is it clear from the subject line what the message is all about and what can be found inside? Do the two connect? Make it clear, understandable, as well as short – around 50 characters. - Most e-mails besides the subject lines also show previews of the content. Make sure you place in the header of your newsletter essential information on what the e-mail is about instead of a photo or a technical information regarding the visibility of the message or an unsubscribe button. The preview is just as important as the subject line and can make a difference in your open rate.
Use Call to Actions
When sending a newsletter, you automatically include different type of topics, each with a specific call to action – to subscribe to downloading an e-book, to purchase something online, to read an article, or to visit a certain page. However, when sending out the newsletter, each one should have a main goal that should be promoted and highlighted, while the other call to actions should be in the background, as a “if you have time and curiosity” option.
Make your design simple and easy to load on any device
As millions of newsletters get sent daily, stand out by having a clear, easy to read and load on any device. You could go for a simple HTML format, that looks as a simple e-mail sent to a friend, which has shown to bring effective results, but if you need to add photos and other elements to it, keep it simple and organized, as well as easy to load and mobile optimized.
Stand out from the crowd with simple and smart techniques that can improve your overall results with your e-mail marketing campaign. Pick your goals, build your database, get creative with subject lines and content, include call to actions and make them look good. The results will show. Good luck!
