The importance of email campaigns on your sales and marketing success is only growing within our increasingly remote and digital business operations.
However, people often that, despite typically writing great copy and having a stellar product or service on offer, they are struggling to get the conversions they need through this powerful medium. The truth is, you might be doing something as simple as making a mistake in your subject line to be shutting yourself off from a large percentage of potential sales and leads.
The truth is that getting your email campaigns right is both an art and a science. Keep reading this article to discover some important tips for email campaign success, particulary for those who are just getting started.
1. Never Shout! SERIOUSLY
The use of exclamation marks and capital letters, both in your subject line / preview text and main content, is a big no no. Not only will this badly effect your open rate through seeming spammy, but it could actually hurt you in the long term through resulting in getting reported by recipitents and potentially blacklisted by your email newsletter service.
2. Don't Neglect the Preview Text
Even as a beginner, we probably don't need you to tell you that a good subject line is absolutely vital to your open rate. However, it isn't just the subject line but also the preview text which will be the biggest combining factor in the open rate of your email. When you realise that preview texts essentially allow you to double the length of your subject line, you'll never think about them the same again...
A lot of the time this will be the first part of your email, which you may want to leave, however, if it is simply repeating your subject line or beginning half a sentence, then this chance to win over your potential client will be wasted. Email preview text ranges from 35 to 140 characters, depending on their browser and device, and is simply an aspect that you cannot afford to neglect!
3. Segment Your Audience and Personalise Your Content
Relevance is key here. Whilst sending mass email blasts may be convenient, it is important to send relevant content to a targeted group of people if you want to get the best open and click through rates.
Of course, when segmenting your audience, it is vital to personalise your content accordingly. Using personalised names is obviously a must here, however, if you can acquire more rich data then you will be able to put out better and more successful email campaigns as a result.
A simple way to get started with this targeted margeting is to segment your contact list into a few broad categories. Current customers and potential customers (prospects) is often the most easy 50/50 split to get the ball rolling. Following on from this, it is useful to segment your contacts by the likes of:
- Location
- Level of engagement (e.g. do they open your emails?)
- Job Title (e.g. are they a decision maker?)
- Product/service type bought (if they are customers)
- Industry/sector
- Stage in their customer journey (when did they become a suscriber/customer?)
4. Harness the Power of Testing
One tip for email campaign success which cannot be overlooked is the importance of testing. Whilst marketing experts can give you lots of successful tools for driving up your open rates and conversions, ultimately everyone's audience is different. Experimenting with different types of subject lines and content by A/B testing can be extremely powerful here whilst you suss out what works best for your contact list
5. Always Know Your Goal
Ultimately, there's always some goal or purspoe that you want your email to have user to take. Often this will be a call-to-action at the end of the content (see heading below for an example)...
Whilst you don't want to be overbearing, you will want this call-to-action to be clear.Best practice here is to have one single goal, so that your recipitent does not get confused or distracted. Also, having one clear goal allows you to focus your marketing copy so that the customer journey brings them naturally to this point.
However, not every email needs to have a goal of selling a particular product or service. Often, the goal here will be to simply nurture your audience and build up a rapport with the customer. Marketing professional Barry Feldman sums this idea up perfectly:
“Where a web page is the terrain, the copywriter’s the tour guide, instructor, concierge, maître d’, and of course, sales clerk. If the copy can’t seal the deal, it must offer something compelling to start some sort of relationship.”
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