Email marketing can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. Not only does it allow you to target and interact with potential customers at a moment’s notice, but it also provides you with the ability to track engagement, interest, and recall on a daily or weekly basis. If used effectively, email marketing can help you identify key metrics such as open rates, click-throughs, and conversion rates to better understand how you can tailor your strategy to maximize success.
However, getting started with email marketing can be a bit tricky. Unless you are actively involved in marketing or know exactly what you’re doing, it can be a bit daunting to get started with the tool. This is where we come in! In this article, we will discuss nine tips for placing commercials (aka. “call to actions”) for email marketing so that you can increase your open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
1. Design for Email
When designing an email, it’s important to remember that you are designing for humans. Even if you are designing for a digital audience (such as a marketing automation platform or a webmail client), you are still designing for humans. Therefore, you must consider things such as:
- Colour contrast
- Readability
- Attention-grabbing subject lines
- Call to actions (CTAs)
- Modern
- Usability
- Leveraging data and imagery (where applicable)
These are just some of the basic guidelines you must follow when considering design for email, but it’s a good place to start. If you want to dive deeper into how to design a catchy subject line, check out these 60 proven ways to write a captivating subject line.
2. Prioritise Keywords
It’s no secret that Google is the ultimate traffic-driver when it comes to search. When someone searches for a product or service on Google, the search engine will try to give them the most relevant, useful results it can. To achieve this, it evaluates a number of different factors and then prioritizes the ones it deems to be the most important.
Prioritizing keywords is a great way to ensure that your campaigns are ranking highly in Google search results. To do this, craft a list of the keywords and key phrases you think your target audience might use to find your product or service. Now, it’s not a good idea to just throw a bunch of keywords at the end of your copy, but you can include them as a part of your creative strategy. For example, if you sell office equipment and someone searches for “equipment for offices”, your chances of showing up are pretty high. You don’t want to miss out on these conversions!
3. Craft an Outline
An outline is a lot like a sales pitch in a magazine. It’s a short introduction to your product or service that highlights the most important information a reader needs to know. When crafting your own outline, start by considering what you already know about the topic. It’s often a good idea to step back and look at the bigger picture. What is the goal of your campaign? What problem are you trying to solve?
By creating an outline, you will be able to clearly define key points to include in your email. This will help you keep your audience interested and ensure they stay engaged throughout your entire piece. Remember: less is more. An outline is just a brief introduction to your product or service, so don’t go overboard.
4. Customise Your Email Content
When someone visits a website or enters an email address into a form, the browser or email client will present them with a piece of content designed to entice them to take action. If you are taking advantage of email marketing to promote your website, it’s likely that you are already creating content for website visitors. However, customizing an email to fit a specific need can dramatically improve its conversion rates. This is especially important if you want to get a specific message across to your target audience.
There are three basic approaches you can take to customizing your email content:
- Layout
- Fashion
- Fonts and colours
Let’s take a quick look at each. If you want to understand how to properly use fonts in your email, read our guide to the 4 fonts that dominate the industry.
5. Use Visual Aids
While it’s great to have an outstanding piece of text, an image can often make a piece of content more memorable. When someone opens your email, they will likely be bombarded with information, but your attempt at keeping their attention will likely be unsuccessful if you don’t offer them something to look at.
To keep your email relevant and interesting, it’s a good idea to include some sort of visual aid. This could be a graph, a picture of the product or service, or even an example of how the product or service works. If you want to drive clicks to a specific page on your website, use an image gallery or animation. If you want to keep things simple, you could even use a graphic designed by an agency to make your brand or company standout.
6. Craft a Fun Fact About Your Product
No one likes to feel like they’re being sold to. To avoid this, you can include fun facts about your product or service that will make it more engaging. If someone is interested in your product, you can bet they’ll be doing their research beforehand. To capture this interest, craft a short fun fact about your product that makes it sound like an interesting piece of information.
For example, if you sell office equipment and your fact is that the pens you sell are made of metal and have been around for over 100 years, that information will be priceless to anyone interested in office equipment. You don’t want to undervalue the importance of this piece of information. If you think of something fun and unique that your product or service can boast about, you can bet your email marketing will benefit from it.
7. Tailor Your CTA
A call to action is what you’re going to want to include at the end of your email, after you’ve told the reader all about your product or service. The CTA is essentially the action the reader is supposed to take to get the most out of your email. It can be as simple as Click here to visit your website or it can be as complex as Download this ebook to get access to a special report.
When it comes to the CTA, less is more. The less you put in it, the more effective it will be. The final tip in this series is to test your call to actions, especially the ones at the end of your emails. See what works best for your product or service and stick with it.
8. Measure the Success of Your Marketing Efforts
Measuring the success of your marketing efforts is a great way to ensure you’re making the right decisions about your strategy. There are three main things you need to keep an eye on:
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Conversions (aka. Actions taken following a click-through)
The first thing you need to look at is your open rates. Your open rates should be high enough to ensure that the person on the other end of the email is actually interested in what you have to say. The higher your open rates are, the more effective your email marketing will be. However, having too high of an open rate can hurt your conversions a little bit. If someone sees your open rate as “low”, they might think that your email is not worth reading or responding to.