Email marketing is still one of the most direct and cost-effective ways to connect with your consumers. When done properly, you can increase your sales, collect valuable feedback from existing customers, and increase leads that will help you grow in the future.
One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is that you can easily track your campaigns' success. The rate at which customers open your emails indicates how enticing your subject line and opening sentence are. As of 2019, Mailchimp’s data had the average open rate for email campaigns in all industries at 21.33 per cent. Government email open rates remain the highest, so their 28.77 per cent sets a solid benchmark for success.
Similarly, according to Agency Analytics, emails have an average click-through rate of 2.5 per cent compared to 0.07 per cent on social media, showing that email does have a place in your marketing campaigns.
Once you have a prospective buyer’s eyes on your email, you’re in the perfect position to build that relationship with your target consumer and sell your product or service. But how do you ensure they make it that far? Below are some of our top tips on building your email marketing strategy.
First, what is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of advertising where companies send emails directly to current or prospective customers. It can appear as a newsletter, promotion, or notice of new products or services. There are many ways to use emails to market your business,
build awareness, and increase your reach. Not only is it cost-effective, but you can personalise your emails, build stronger relationships, and share information of value with
your customers.
How you develop your email marketing strategy can make all the difference in the campaign's open rate, click-through rate, and overall success.
Here are some actions you can take to ensure you reach your target audience and ultimately increase your sales.
- Master the subject line
What is email marketing without a killer subject line? It’s the first thing a reader sees and will make all the difference for your open rates. Around 47 per cent of email recipients decide to open an email solely based on the subject line, and 69 per cent categorise email as spam for the same reason. So, your subject line can be the make or break for the success of your campaign.
Ideally, your subject should be between 35 and 45 characters. That is short. But if you get creative, you can have a great impact with those characters. Since 46 per cent of all email opens happen on mobile platforms, under 35 characters works best. It’s a good idea to write your subject last, so you can develop it around the content and make it stand out.
Some ways you can build a great subject line include:
Asking a question
Offer a grand promise
Include a special offer
Make it seem urgent
- Perfect the first line
The most important element of your email after the subject line is your first line. It often appears as the preview text, offering a fantastic opportunity to reel the reader in. One of the benefits of email marketing is the real estate you take up in a prospective customer’s inbox, so use your space carefully with text that stands out and tempts the customer. Make it punchy, and reveal a little more detail than the subject line so your reader can gain some context and be interested enough to click through.
- Know your audience
To craft an enticing email, first you need to know what your audience wants. Once you understand what they struggle with and how they need support, you can build on those pain points and tailor your offer accordingly. Do they want discounts? Do they need to know more about your service? Can you offer them top tips? Eventually, you can use analytics to track your audience’s open rates and design a strategy based on content that has historically encouraged them to click through. Data is your friend and so very valuable.
- Keep it sharp
A big benefit of email marketing is that potential customers can read your emails from anywhere, even if they’re on the go. In order to keep up with the fast-paced world, you’ll need to keep your email content short and sweet, using short, scannable sentences and paragraphs to keep your reader engaged. The ideal email length is 200 words or less, which has been found to have the highest click-through rates.
- Don’t shout
Remember those super shouty TV adverts of days gone by? Yep, you don’t want to sound like that. So avoid all-caps, exclamation marks, and overly enthusiastic language. This comes off as salesy and convinces a casual reader to steer away to something else. An email marketing strategy based on these tactics will turn off prospective customers, and even the small error of putting the first letter of every word in your subject line can come across as salesy and even see your email filtered into the spam folder.
- Keep it friendly
Use upbeat, friendly, and chatty language, showing the potential customer you’re not here for the hard sell. Instead, you aim to offer the reader something useful and develop a lasting relationship. Whether you’re providing top tips or services to help solve a problem, you’ll want to talk to your readers like real people. Ensure you sound human, and even add some humour if it aligns with your brand voice.
- Stay relevant
If you’re planning to send a series of emails as part of your campaign, ensure each element has a point. Are you promoting prices, debuting new services, or introducing your brand to a new lead? Map out an email marketing strategy that creates a user journey, with an email for each step in the chain, from alerting them to a new service or offer to letting them know when an offer is running out. If it’s a chain of eight emails, you want to change the messaging on each one and not spam readers with the same message repeatedly.
- Don’t Forget the call to action
Each email you send needs to have an aim - driving your reader to take action is one of the many benefits of email marketing. Including a call to action (CTA) is essential. Decide your CTA by asking yourself what you want people to do with your email. Do you want them to book a service, get in touch, or click to learn more? Perhaps you want them to read the rest of a useful blog you’ve teased or follow you on social media. Add a persuasive phrase to explain and a button, so they can take that action.
- Keep it newsworthy
Consider any news angles you can hook into when devising your email marketing strategy. What are people talking about online? Can you track any trends and then link them? Use sites like Google Trends to discover the topics making waves and develop creative ways to join the conversation. It’s a great way to give you ideas and to go beyond just sales-led messaging - join the global conversation with an opinion and helpful information.
- Maintain an urgent tone
People don’t like to miss out on a deal, a new trend, or be the last to learn of a new company in town. Tap into the element of FOMO and craft messaging about deals and discounts coming to an end. You can find a sweet spot in your email marketing strategy by appealing to this sense of urgency without using overly dramatic language.
- Implement your email marketing strategy
From succinct subjects to chatty or urgent tones and newsworthy content, we’ve given you a lot to play with when building your campaign. The benefits of email marketing are well worth the effort involved in researching and devising your ideal style. However, there are experts to help if you’d prefer to spend your valuable time elsewhere.
We are professionals who can help take a load off your mind, creating beautiful email campaigns that increase your conversion rates and encourage more customers to click through your content. Are you eager to develop your email marketing but unsure where to start?