I thought it would be useful for all of you who are just starting in email marketing to lay out few basic elements for your emails. With a well-crafted email you can skyrocket your results and over the last few years I have developed a list of things, which I include in my emails. They’re nothing extraordinary or super-inventive. Just simple things that require little time and effort but can make your campaigns both more profitable and successful.
Well… Valentine’s Day was 3 weeks ago, but if you’re planning to create some mushy email campaign for the next year, you better read this article already. Here is some insight and inspiration for you. The overall idea this year was to focus on products and offers that were already available and just adjusting them to this special occasion. So even if you don’t have time or any special campaign for this holiday, you can use it to promote and sell some more of your products/offers. Go ahead and spread some love!
Subject line’s purpose should reach far beyond a simple unique open. It should generate RIA: recognition, interest, action.
Each of those three issues has already been discussed in detail on many specialist corporate (and not only) blogs, including this one.
Today I’d like to focus on the third one: action. Email marketing basics will tell you that nothing inspires action better than a powerful call to action. Let’s analyze a handful of picks from my inbox to see if and how CTAs can improve the engagement metrics.
Creating the sense of urgency in your newsletter is supposed to be one of the killer tactics for boosting engagement rates and turning your prospects into customers. Information about a limited offer is bound to push to action those readers who normally have the tendency to hesitate and delay purchases.
It’s the era of information and with it comes the growing awareness of the marketing strategies that are attacking us from every corner. The customers are getting better at spotting sham, and with it their selectivity grows. This means that you need to double your efforts for the message to get through, and find new approach measured by metrics other than CTR or ROI. Purely transactional attitude is not a long-term strategy anymore.
Although many email marketers still struggle to make it work, the integration of your email campaigns with social media is a must. Everybody goes social on the net, so Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and their like have become the most influential media. Today your audiences must be built via many channels to keep you on top and ahead of the competition. Working adults, who with the highest disposable income are the highest purchase intent group, check their emails with a far greater regularity than use their social media accounts. However, email campaigns, even the highly personalized ones, only reach relevance in context of a relatively small group susceptible to your call-to-action. That’s the end of the story. Within a few days your email goes to the bottom of the list, and then becomes expired. However, if you try to integrate it with any online social community, its lifecycle is much longer, as a supplementary stage is introduced. A small number of genuinely interested email recipients pass on the message to a larger group of similar enthusiasts, some of them share it further and this way you get free supplementary brand promotion, more buzz, increased brand exposure and brand awareness and your message wins second life.
Easter seems to be an unpopular email motif.
Out of 250 newsletters in my inbox (on week’s share) 25 used it – with only 13 including it in the subject line. Two days before the Good Friday I still haven’t got a single Easter wishes email!! Well, only family and friends, but that doesn’t count…
I really lack inspiration for this week post. Mainly because my inbox provides no breathtaking creatives. A glimpse at messages from the last ten days brings variations of the same few ideas: spring/summer collections, limited offers, deadlines, last calls, sales, discounts, free shipping offers and essential style tips. Just how much shopping can your wallet bear?
Meeting the requirement of high level of individualization in an email campaign can be time-consuming and normally involves a detailed customer profile. However, there’s a trick that you can do once in a while to bring out the sense of high level of relevance. All you have to do is watch out for opportunities in the real life and build your newsletter around it. Hence, today’s topic is: a review of a few recent real time emailing campaigns.
The question of efficient brand promotion has recently become vital for all online retailers. No service or product is unique anymore – their distinctive features sink in the sea of variations of the same idea. Ruthless as it sounds, we have to face it and deal with it. If we want it to be us, and not the tens or hundreds of our likes we have to stand out from the crowd, become recognizable and memorable.
