When thinking about email marketing and your business, the whole task can be daunting. I would always recommend that you stay focused on the key aspect, engagement. No matter what you’re selling, educating or sharing with your subscribers you want them to engage. So I have put together some simple best practices to help consistently create emails that engage:
Always be clear with your goals
The main metrics email campaigns are measured by are Open Rates and Click Rates. By making your goal clear from the beginning you can measure the results more effectively. Over time this will also let you see which topics are the most engaging and which one’s flopped.
Common goals are: To sell one or a few products, coupon downloads and “read the full article”.
Be concise with BOTH text and visuals
Think of the emails you read… You’re not in your inbox to read a novel, your scanning and digesting content fairly quickly. The key is to always be concise and offer something engaging. Try to limit yourself to a short paragraph, maybe a few bullet points and a clear call-to-action. Then just use one or two simple images that directly relate to your content. If you’re feeling adventurous you can also embed a .gif for some added entertainment. Check out Giphy sometime.
Be consistent
Get on a schedule and stick to it. If everyone expects an email from you on Fridays keep it up. Your customer or prospect will be looking forward to it and expect it. We do realize that new announcements, sales and important notices come up from time to time and that’s ok. That’s where the next point will be important.
Maintain your brand!
If you are a jokester don’t stop making funny emails. If you’re science driven don’t stop nerding it up. When your email recipient knows what to expect they’ll be looking for that ray of sunshine in their inbox every time.
Please use an email service!!!
Services like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Hubspot help ensure email deliverability and proper email design. Believe us, building an email template from scratch that is responsive and works across the plethora of email clients out there is no small task. Then think about the lists you need to manage and send to. These services are great! Also, every one of those services have some awesome auto-generated reports to monitor your results.
Personalize it
Services like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Hubspot have awesome personalization tools. You can make the subject line and any text in your email have any subscriber’s name. You can make the content completely change depending on where they live and what they like. The more you personalize, the more engaged a customer will become.
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