Email marketing has been and continues to be an extremely important and beneficial way to connect with your customers. Not only does it give you a chance to communicate various things happening like recent company news, new products, or sales and promotions, it also provides additional ways to make another connection with your customer. Giving them the ability to see and understand your product or service more, you can continue to be top of mind with them hopefully leading to a purchase decision.
When it comes to email marketing, there isn’t an exact science and it’s not one size fits all. Different markets and audiences vary from industry to industry and even from organization to organization. In order to better help plan and understand email marketing, our team of email wizards has pulled together 5 do’s & don’ts for email marketing.
-
First impressions are everything
We always say that first impressions are everything and the first thing your customer is going to see when getting an email is the subject and preview line. If you can’t capture their attention during the first impression, you’ve already lost them. Coming up with short and catchy subject lines and preview text is crucial to every email. Make sure you are keeping it short and sweet but engaging enough for them to want to read more and check out what you have inside. -
Keep your content limited
Make sure to limit the variety of content that is included in your emails. A huge turn-off for many customers is when they open an email to see a novel. Keep your messaging short, sweet, and to the point. Pick the one topic you plan on discussing during your blast and stick to you. If you have an additional topic or two that you’d like to just mention or touch on in your email, you can always add it as a secondary section at the bottom. Make sure to limit the content you choose to include and ask yourself if you have enough details and content to create two totally different emails, it might be worth trimming it down or separating entirely. -
Visual elements are key
Not only is catchy and attention-grabbing content key, but so is incorporating the right visual elements. From pictures to GIFs, and videos, each of these items are an important element in creating an eye-catching email. They say pictures can speak louder than words and keeping this in mind while building your emails will keep customers engaged and continue to come back. -
Don’t forget the call-to-action
Now you have great content, amazing visuals, what’s next? Now you need to get your customer to your end goal. You created this email blast for a reason. Whether that is to promote a new product, dive in deeper about a product line, or share details for an upcoming event. Whatever the messaging may be, you are trying to share information on something. To make the purpose of the email successful, you’ll want to be sure to have a clear call-to-action (CTA). Make sure to add multiple areas throughout the email prompting your customers to find the information you are trying to share. Creating various buttons with the necessary CTA and associated link as well as linking out your visuals to your end location is one of the most important steps. If you go through all of the work to make an email and send it out, make sure you are driving your traffic to the webpage you emailed them about in the first place. - Email frequency
The frequency in which you should send out emails is always a heavy-hitting topic. Some people think sending out multiple emails in one day is the key, while others are on the opposite side of the spectrum with sending out once a month. The best place to start is to see what others are doing in your industry. After knowing what those details are, you can determine where you and your organization feel is a good place to start. Our team always likes to err on the side of caution as you don’t want to scare away your contacts by sending too many off the bat. Another great way to start is to think about the emails you get in your inbox each and every day. Then think about the ones you want to open and the ones you want to unsubscribe from. Ultimately there isn’t a right or a wrong way to do this. The best plan of action is to start somewhere and always be sure to track and monitor your analytics. After knowing how your emails are performing with your current plan don’t be afraid to alter it to continue to work and find the right recipe that will work for you.
As you can see, there isn’t one formula for email marketing. What works for one organization might not work for another even in the same industry. Continuing to create your email marketing plan and stick to it, but also monitoring and analyzing data to see how you are performing along the way is key. The best thing to know is that you aren’t set in stone with your plan. You should create a plan and test it out for a while but also be willing to fluctuate your plan in order to test and try new things.
If you are new to email marketing and don’t know where to start, consider reaching out for help. Our team of marketing experts works across several industries in creating engaging email content. We would be thrilled to work alongside you and your organization in helping to take the right steps in building out an email campaign that is built for your and your business’s needs. If you’d like to take this next step or just want to learn more, please reach out to the team at Blue42 and we’d be happy to help to build out an email marketing plan fit for your needs.
Blue42.