Email marketing is an important part of any marketing campaign. Unfortunately it’s often left out of the plan as newer tactics are thought to be more important, such as social media. But a marketing campaign should be full and leave no stone unturned. The power of email marketing shouldn’t be over looked. We welcome this guest blog post to tell you how you can make your email marketing campaigns more effective.
Email marketing has admittedly gotten a bit more difficult since Google’s Gmail compartmentalized their inboxes. Most promotional and informational emails are gathered up with spam and poor marketing material, thereby decreasing the seen and open rates. This is likely due to the fact that taken one by one, marketing emails don’t seem too bad or intrusive. But when they are all lumped together—the good with the bad, the spam with the actual newsletters people subscribe to—it can get overwhelming and feel like your inbox is being invaded by marketers.
Six Simple Email Marketing Hacks to Get Readers Involved
In order to overcome this new disadvantage, email marketers have had to become more savvy, namely picking up better ways to increase visibility in the inbox, open rates, content quality and ultimately, click-thru rates. Here are six things that you can do with your email marketing campaigns to make them more successful on the whole.
- Write Urgent Subject Lines. Creating a sense of urgency in your subject line will increase your open rate. Too often we get emails and think, “that can wait.” What happens then? The email gets further and further down the list and instead of waiting, the email disappears. Use words to generate a sense of urgency such as limited time, referring to today’s date, talking about a brand new feature that changes everything, etc.
- Write Better Content. Email marketing campaigns should be composed in such a manner that they are compelling to read. We tend to take it for granted that people are going to read an email just because they signed up for a newsletter, so many campaigns just send out links to the site. That’s not going to get those click-thrus. You need just as compelling content in your email as you have on your website or blog. If you aren’t getting them to the final destination, your email marketing is a failure no matter how many opens you get.
- Write Focused Content. Write more emails with less vagueness. In other words, get to the point and make that point as sharp as possible. Don’t send out an email that is scattered all over the place, talking about five different products over four different niches. Focus on one message, make it as clear and concise as possible, tighten it up even more, edit that and then send it. Nobody has time to waste picking through the garbage for the gems.
- Tell the Get. This is simple and marketing 101, but it’s amazing how many people forget this. Your reader has one question on their mind when they look at and then open your email: What’s in it for me? Why should I open this? Why should I read this? Why should I click this? What do I get? It’s you’re job to tell them at every step of the way—tell them “the get.”
- Add Social Widgets. Adding widgets for your social sites directly in your email opens another channel up for your clients to find your content or site. It helps them stay connected to your message and in many cases, will let them know you’re out there. They might not even know you have a Twitter or Facebook. While this will swing some of the success over to the social media marketing department, it is trackable through email click-thru metrics and besides, interdepartmental integration is a thing now, haven’t you heard?
- Follow Up. Finally, always follow up with your emails. While it might seem a little invasive or bothersome, think about it this way: it only takes a person one or two seconds to tell you to leave them alone or to unsubscribe. While that might not look good if your emails are getting large unsubscribe rates, what it is actually doing is qualifying your leads. If someone is getting annoyed because you ask them what they thought about the latest product, chances are they aren’t going to buy the product anyways. Of course, this is tricky territory here if you come across as annoying, but having qualified leads and weeding out the people who aren’t interested will eventually raise your open rates, click-thru rates and conversion rates by nature of having a more qualified captive audience.
How Can I Make My Email Marketing Campaigns Even Better?
If you are already using these techniques and are still experiencing an unacceptable downturn in the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, there are likely other factors at work. Outside influencers such as a downtrodden economy leaving your industry with less consumer confidence can factor into the overall successful nature of all of your marketing campaigns.
Author Bio – Brad Fisher, the author of this guest article, writes for this company named Ballantine, a family-owned direct marketing company established in 1966. To learn more about sending out direct mail, get in touch with Ballantine today.