The purpose of an email campaign is to generate interest within your contacts, encouraging them to either buy your product or service or to visit your website. With so much competition, it is essential to ensure that your emails are as effective as possible, drawing in as many contacts as possible to either become a customer or subscribe to your newsletter.
To achieve this, you need to consider multiple factors, from the subject line to the body copy of the email. Although you may ultimately decide to use a combination of both, your choice is yours, the aim is to make your life easier by following established best practices.
Create a memorable experience with a strong call-to-action
The starting point of your email design process is your invitation to be part of an important conversation. This is followed by a brief introduction of who you are, what you do and why the person on the other side of the email might be interested in what you have to say.
What is important about the invitation to this important conversation is that it is memorable and stands out above the rest. To achieve this, you must consider the fact that people have already begun to scroll through their inboxes, bored of reading dull subject lines and looking for a quick way to get through the day. The temptation is to simply throw up a standard email template and add a bit of personality on the side, but this will not make a memorable impression and probably won’t even make it to the inbox.
Throwing a quick line of text in the subject line is not enough; in fact, it can even hurt your efforts, especially if you are not careful enough. In addition to this, the body of the email should not be used as a dumping ground for hard-to-resist affiliate marketing links, but instead it should contain something valuable and of interest to your audience. If you can engage your reader and make them continue to browse your email, you have accomplished something worthwhile. The temptation is to make the email longer and include more ‘chunks’ of text, but this can also work against you. The more text there is within the email, the more room there is for others to write a response, creating what is known as a “chain letter.” The aim is to keep the email concise and snappy, so that your recipient does not have too much time to think about what they are reading, but instead have time to take action.
A/B Testing For Fun and Profit
As a marketer, it’s your job to drive as much traffic as possible to your site. One of the best ways to do this is via email marketing, but generating a steady stream of interest and action can be a challenge. To increase the odds of success, you can use A/B testing, which randomly assigns sub-sections of an email’s content to different groups of recipients, monitoring the results of the email’s performance in real-time.
For example, you might want to test a quick-fire tactic where you highlight a key feature of your product or service, followed by an offer, against a more traditional, “welcome” message, used as a baseline comparison. The idea is to see which option generates the most interest and, therefore, conversion.
Once you have established the winner, you can replicate and scale it across your entire email marketing program. The goal is to not only increase your conversion rates but to drive them as close to 100 percent as possible, in order to maximize your profit.
Keep Your Email Simple
Another important factor to consider when designing your email is to keep it as simple as possible. This is essential in order to maximize its effectiveness. To further improve your odds of success, you should avoid using complex sentences, as these will make your email harder to comprehend. Instead, stick with short sentences or bullet points, as these allow your reader to get the point without having to think too hard.
A good rule of thumb is to keep your sentences to a minimum and broken down into shorter, more manageable chunks. Consider the information you have and the action your audience can take. If you can keep the information balanced and easy to follow, you have achieved a good balance between interest and coherency.
Avoid Sending Too Many Follow-Up Emails
One of the worst things you can do as a marketer is to bombard your contacts with emails, after emailing them once or twice, only to follow up with a third and fourth email, just to say “thank you.”
You should be able to identify a contact’s interests accurately, after the first email, and should only approach them with relevant content, which is relevant to their interests. If you want to follow up with an email, but they didn’t click through to your site or buy your product or service in the first place, then this second email might be an opportunity to approach them with content that is even more relevant to what they are interested in. Of course, this will depend on your email marketing platform and how you have configured it.
If you are not sending relevant content to your contacts, you are wasting your time and potentially hurting your brand. The fact you are even thinking about sending another email, after already engaging with the person on one or more occasions, is a clear sign you are heading in the right direction.
Monitor Your Results
To see how your email is performing, you can use a tool like MailChimp, which provides you with insights into how many people opened the email, how many clicked on a link or button and how many converted, with a bit of information about the person clicking on your email.
You can also use Google Analytics to track the success of your email marketing approach, by using a tool like the HubSpot Analytics integration, which is available on their platform. With this integration, you can track the success of individual emails, as well as entire marketing campaigns, in real-time.
From a performance perspective, you can track the following: – The total number of impressions, clicks, and conversions that occurred due to the content of your email.
– The total number of opt-ins and the confirmation rate, along with the average revenue per user, for an affiliate marketing program implemented via email marketing.
Designing Effective Email Marketing Campaigns
To ensure your emails are as effective as possible, you need to follow a few simple steps. These include:
- Choose a memorable subject line.
- Design an email that is easy to read.
- Place a clear call-to-action at the end of the email.
With these three steps, you will see an increase in your conversion rates, proving the worth of your email marketing efforts.