A great way to engage your audience, establish brand awareness, increase your revenue, and build relationships with customers and prospects is through email marketing. You can also see real-time analytics that help you find what works based on your audience behaviors and fine-tune your approach to generate a higher ROI.
Finding the perfect approach, however, can be a tricky and tedious task. There is a fine line between a recipient looking forward to receiving your awesome content regularly and giving an eye roll at yet another useless email that they instantly trash without opening.
Your subscribers have given you the wonderful marketing gift of a coveted spot in their inbox – don’t abuse it by overwhelming them with annoying daily emails that they couldn’t give two hoots about. Or even worse, having content they would actually love, but sending so often that they completely glance past it.
Rather, honor them and the opportunity they’ve provided you by consistently offering valuable content that people welcome with open, loving eyes. We’ve got 5 quick tips to help you get off to great start:
1. Setting Your Sender Name (and Sticking to It)
A sender name is the first thing viewers will see, so make sure yours is something unique and easily recognizable. Your business name is perfectly fine. ‘Do Not Reply’ is not.
After a few emails, your sender name is easily recognized by recipients, so don’t try anything too fancy here or experiment with a bunch of different options. Changing it up could cause recipients to trash your message without opening it if they have to question for even a second who it’s from. This means that not only will your content not be seen, but also that your campaign rating may suffer, and future messages won’t make it to their primary inbox.
Pro note: What is a campaign rating?
Each campaign, or email you send to your list of subscribers, is rated based on things like open and reply rates, movement into or out of the junk folder, etc., by the ISP/inbox provider to help reduce spam.
Let’s say the last campaign you sent saw a majority of Gmail users trash your email without opening the message or moving it to their junk folder. This would likely trigger your next email to those users to be sent directly to their junk folder.
2. Making an Impact with Your Subject Line
The second element of an email campaign viewers will read (and potentially the most important) is the almighty subject line. This gives you an opportunity to intrigue the subscriber enough to motivate them to open your email. It can actually make or break the success of your email, so think this one through thoroughly.
Make sure to keep it classy (use correct grammar), sassy (appeal to your audience) and concise (41 characters is optimal), while also portraying how this content will offer value of some kind to their life.
Are you solving a problem for consumers? Giving away some free goodies? Sharing sought-after information relevant to their business? Let your subscribers know in a fun and enticing way while keeping it short and sweet.
The goal here is to create such a compelling subject like that they can’t help but open your email. Get creative with it and test out different lines to find what your audience resonates with most. Here are some great tips to help you get started.
3. Write Messages That Resonate with Your Subscribers
Regardless of whether you’re sending a campaign to 200, 2,000 or 200,000 people, when writing content remember to focus on the individual vs. the masses.
Additionally, today’s handy-dandy email marketing tools, such as MailChimp or Constant Contact, make it super easy to personalize your messages to the individual recipients by inputting their name into the email message to give it that extra personal touch.
Keep it simple, though, and don’t overdo it by littering the email with their name all over the place – that can come off as creepy and tends to warrant opt-outs.
4. Add Value to Your Viewer’s Inbox
Put the highest emphasis on what kind of value you are providing your viewers. You can have all the flashy, fascinating subjects and graphics, but if you aren’t presenting content that offers value to their lives, you will quickly lose their attention.
Know your customer, their challenges, and how your service or product can truly change their lives in a positive way. They will thank you by continuing to click those links open and share your content with others, because they truly believe in your business. Win-win-winning. Get some killer content tips here.
5. Test for Success
Okay, so you’ve crushed #1-4 and you just cannot wait to hit that send button – we totally get it, you did fabulous work and you want to share it with the world; kudos! But before you take that step, give yourself a chance to test once, twice, as many times as needed to make sure everything looks perfect before you send it off to the masses.
Proofing is your best friend here – there is nothing worse than spending all your time and effort to create killer content just to have a misspelled word be the only thing your audience remembers. Trust us, a second set of eyes or even just taking a break and looking at an email with fresh eyes will make all the difference in the world.
We hope these quick tips help you elevate your email marketing strategies and inspire your viewers to click. Feeling overwhelmed and too busy running your business to begin thinking about where to start with email marketing? We’ve got your back – contact our team at Stray Media Group to take this off your marketing to-do list.