Email is often left behind in today’s Social Media obsessed world. But done right, emails can achieve great results and they can be social too! Here' s a great guest blog post from Vistage speaker Susan Hallam
Here are 5 quick tips that you can implement in your email marketing to start seeing improvements straight away.
1. Brand your email
Is it easy to recognise your company straight away from the design of your email? Remember that your branding, company logo and important messages should be visible in the email preview pane. The size of the preview pane varies between email clients but keeping this information in the top 400 pixels is what we advise you use.
2. Include a Call to Action
Make it obvious to recipients what you want them to do. Simply reading an email is not ‘doing’! Do you want them to purchase something from your website? Sign up to an event? Call you? Tell them what you want and make it easy for them to do it. Make your Call to Action direct, easy to understand and easy to see.
3. Test
The beauty of email is that it is very easy to test. Some email marketing services even have testing built in. You’re testing different areas of the email to achieve the best possible response. Consider testing -
- Subject lines
- ‘From’ names
- The amount of copy you use
- Layout of the email
- Use of images
4. Personalisation
Have you tried personalising your emails to include the recipient’s name, or reminder dates, or product names? It’s likely your database already has this information about your clients (and maybe even potential clients) so use it to your advantage. Your emails will get a much better response if people feel like they are receiving a personalised communication rather than a non-specific mass email that has been sent out to everyone.
5. Treat Recipients Differently
You should be treating recipients on your mailing list differently based on their interaction with previous emails you have sent. Try sending a following up email to all the recipients you know opened or clicked your last email. These people are the ones that are most engaged with your communication, and open rates, click through rates (CTR) and conversions will be higher when you segment and target email communications based on what you know about your recipients.
The exception!
Of course, there are exceptions to all rules! Take the cartoonist Hugh MacLeod for example. He sends a daily email out that consistently gets 40%+ open rate. So how does he do it? With carefully crafted copy? Intricate A/B split testing? Nope. He just sends a fun cartoon image!
His emails work because they are based on the premise, ‘that good ideas spread naturally. We are hard-wired to share stuff worth sharing’.
Remember, email can be social too! Craft content that people want to share with their friends and make it easy for them to do so by including social share buttons in your emails like these
