So, you’ve decided to launch a new email marketing campaign in hopes of gaining a few more sales, leads, conversions, or end goals. What you’ve done in the past has worked… kind of. A handful of people opened your emails, a couple responded, and a few even turned into customers; these certainly weren’t the results you were hoping for, though. No company can grow and expand as they’d hope with only handfuls of people, so it’s safe to say that your email marketing campaign may have to be taken up a notch. Thankfully, you’ll be able to do just that by following these helpful reminders; make sure to keep them in mind while executing your next email marketing campaign.
What’s the first thing you look at while you’re scanning the emails in your inbox every morning? The subject line? Maybe, but more than likely what you’re looking at is who the email is from. Spam emails have become such a common thing in today’s day and age that many people have just grown to accept that they’re going to receive them. So, instead of reading each title of the emails, the recipient simply reads the names of the sender. If he/she recognizes a name, they then consider opening the email by looking at the title, but being recognized is definitely the first part of the puzzle. Make sure your email’s ‘From’ name is either your company’s name, or from a selected employee there; whichever you choose make sure to use it every time you send out a new email. You want your ‘From’ name to be consistent so your readers recognize you and keep you in the inbox rather than the junk folder.
After you’ve chosen a ‘From’ name, it is now time to start worrying about your subject line. Now, even though you’re very excited about what you have to say, you need to do your best at containing your excitement until the recipient opens your email. Anything with exclamation points (!!!), upper case letters (EXAMPLE), or profit signs ($) is going to be instantly picked up by their spam filter. Yes, the event/promotion/announcement may be worthy of some of these things, but do your best at refraining from using them, especially in the subject line. If the news really is that exciting, you shouldn’t have to shower them with fancy symbols anyway, so keep calm and create a unique subject line that will make the recipient want to read your email without any tricks or gimmicks.
Okay, so you’ve enticed your recipient to open your email, not it’s time to deliver the message. What is your call-to-action, aka what is the purpose of sending them this email in the first place? Do you want their recipient to buy a product, attend an event, or check out your blog? Well, let them know, and make sure to do it quickly. Although you’ve intrigued them enough to open your email, there is still a very good chance that they might stray away, so you always want your call-to-action to be stated rather quickly. Take advantage of their attention while you have it that way they will, at the very least, be able to take away the mail goal of your email.
There really is no point at going through the process and creating this elaborate email marketing campaign if you’re going to use language, facts, and figures that your audience does not understand. You’re not going to be getting responses this way and you definitely won’t be seeing any conversions either. Make sure your message is written in a way that your audience will understand and almost flows like a conversation instead of a sales pitch. People like working and interacting with other people, after all, not computers, so do your best to write and appear as a friend rather than a business.
The campaign you create can be attached or related to just about anything that’s going on in the news or life in general, so take advantage of this! New Years right around the corner? Have a campaign related to that! ‘Start the new year off right with a deal/promotion/announcement from [your company].’ This can be applied to any holiday, event, or cause, so take some time to brainstorm about what’s going on in the news or time of year and create an email marketing campaign that goes hand-in-hand with it. Your email recipients will relate to this and want to jump on the bandwagon for the cause.
This can be done for a number of different reasons. For example, some emails may be targeted for women, so it’d be smart to send them to your women email recipients. Other emails may be targeted for teenagers, so you’d want to send them to people between the ages of 13-19. This is just a more effective way to reach the people who would benefit from your information the most. You could also, however, separate your recipients into groups to test two different types of emails to see which one gets a better response. Testing and modifying your emails is something that will pay significantly in the end, so make sure to give yourself the time and resources to do so.
People are constantly switching, obtaining new, and deleting old email addresses so chances are you have a few that have gone a long time without use. It’s time to get rid of those that are worthless to open to the door to new users, and here’s how: send out an email to those on your mailing list promising them a product or service free of charge. Obviously, even those who rarely read your emails will want to take you up on this offer, so there is a good chance that just about every recipient will accept or at least open your offer. Any recipient who does not, however, can be considered an expired contact. If you can’t entice them with a free product, there is no hope for the email address anymore; it’s time to let that address go.
After you’ve flushed out all of the old email addresses, it’s time to replace them with some new ones! Luckily, this process is fairly simple and has many options to do so. First, you could offer an email signup sheet or option at each check-out lane or center. This is a great way to gain email addresses of people who you know are interested in what your emails or newsletters have to say. Another option would be to bring a sign up sheet to any company event you attend, like seminars, trade shows, promotions, and so on. Again, these are people who are clearly interested in your company, so why not allow them to further their education through helpful emails.
If all has gone well, there is a good chance that your recipient will want to follow through with your call-to-action. They may like it so much, in fact, that they want their friends, family, and acquaintances to know about it to. This is why each email your business sends should be embedded with social share buttons. Let your recipients share your email information with their Facebook friends, Twitter followers, or email contacts and let your word spread. Before you know it, you may be acquiring even more email contacts simply by word of mouth advertising from your existing ones. Go ahead and let them do the work for you; give them the option to share.
Even though all of your text and information is very valuable to the recipient, incorporating graphics into your email could help seal the deal. As the age old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, or in today’s age, a thousand clicks, so giving people a visual of what you want or what the final outcome would be is a great way to help boost conversions. One or two is all you need as you don’t want to slow down the page’s loading time, but make them one or two good ones to portray your point perfectly.
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By Ken Franzen
President / Co-Founder of Neon Goldfish
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