Email marketing is a great way to connect and engage with your clients. It’s cost-effective and has a high ROI compared to other marketing avenues. Email marketing is also trackable—after each campaign, you can can check your engagement levels and adjust your marketing for future campaigns. As with all marketing media, you’re competing for your audience’s attention. And Since the average business user receives 90 emails a day, your email need to make an impact to reach your subscribers. Here are 5 tips on how to create effective email campaigns:
1. Construct the Perfect Subject Line
The subject line is the first impression of your email campaign. Most of the time, the subject line is the deciding factor of whether or not a user opens your email. Your subject line should be short and to the point. Each device, browser, and email client displays different subject line lengths, therefore, you should avoid cramming too much information into the subject line, while still keeping important information towards the front of the subject line. The optimal subject line length is 50–65 characters. You can also use preheader text along with your subject line. Preheader text follows the subject line and can be used to tease the content of the email.
2. Make sure your email is mobile-friendly.
No one can deny the impact smartphones have had on the world. More and more people now are checking email on their smartphones: in fact, 55% of all emails are opened on a mobile device! This number can be higher depending on your audience and the delivery time of your email (more on this later). So, if your emails aren’t mobile-optimized, your emails will be hard to read on their smartphone, and run the dangerous risk of alienating your audience–80% of people will delete an email that doesn’t look good on their phone!
3. Craft content that is scannable.
People often make the mistake of crafting long, wordy emails, creating a wall of text that looks intimidating, and also bothersome to read. In fact, 80% of people are only scanning your email. To reach more of your audience, you need to create content that is easily scannable. By creating imagery that highlights key information, you’ll create easily scannable emails with greater impact–particularly because the human brain processes images 60,000x faster than text!
If you’re sending out a newsletter or a press release, consider using a headline with a few sentences of copy and a call-to-action button that links out to your website. Using buttons as the main call-to-action has two purposes:
- Buttons attract more attention than links due to their size, color, and placement (let’s face it, we like hitting buttons!).
- By linking out to another page, you can track engagement levels to provide valuable information about your subscribers preferences.
4. Test your emails before sending.
Each email client (like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Apple Mail) renders the same email code differently! So before you send out your email, make sure to test its compatibility with multiple email clients and devices. At Enthusiast, we use the Litmus service to ensure that your mailing looks good across all of the major email clients, but also stays out of their unique spam filters. Be sure to test links and check for spelling and grammar mistakes in your email too!
5. Study your audience using your mailing’s response data.
One of the most useful aspects of email marketing is the ability to see how your audience reacted to your campaign by viewing your mailing’s response data. Every email list is unique and responds to emails in different ways, depending on the audience and industry. Therefore, you should always make notes about the effectiveness of your email campaign. A few things you should consider:
a. Does the distribution time affect your responses? For instance, an email from a movie theater with a free popcorn offer will get a better response if it’s distributed over the weekend instead of 10 AM on a weekday.
b. Who’s interacting with your email? Segmenting your audience based on your open rate and click rate is effective in creating long-term engagement by providing content that the subscriber is interested in. Targeted emails drive 18x more revenue than mass emails.
c. Is there a specific email client that most of your clients use? For example, if most of your clients use Outlook, you can place more priority on making the email look good on Outlook during the testing phase.
Learn from your mailing and apply that knowledge to future mailings.
Not sure how to start? Reach out to us! Enthusiast can help you create and distribute beautifully designed emails that deliver results.
Sources:
Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2015–2019.
Campaign Monitor, How to determine the best length for your email subject lines.
Litmus, February 2016 Email Market Share: Mobile Opens Climb Back to 55%.
Emma, 18 Must-Know Email Stats for Modern Marketers.
