Magnetize Your Audience with High Performing Emails

If you’ve spent a great deal of time creating and executing a social media strategy, we applaud your efforts! While social media is a key component to marketing your business, we often need to remind companies not to forget about the power and effectiveness of email marketing. After all, email marketing and social media are like fish and chips. Designing an effective email marketing campaign requires strategy, intent and understanding your user behaviour.

Email Marketing

It seems like email marketing suffers from a lack of adoption and in some cases poor reputation.  People resist using it because they fear that customers will unsubscribe or that their efforts will sit unread. Like any marketing you do though, interesting and useful content will get read! So, let’s talk about what you need to do in order to design high performing email marketing campaigns that will help you grow your business.

Catch Their Attention

You only have a few seconds to catch the attention of your readers. In order to be effective at getting those eyeballs to open your email, you need to:

  • Be mobile friendly: Your email has to look good on mobile devices. Clickable areas need to be tap friendly, the font needs to be large enough to read easily and readers should not have to swipe or zoom to see content.
  • Be transparent: People are more likely to delete confusing messages! You have four chances (which is actually pretty great – so use them wisely!) to be clear about what you want to say:
    • Sender name
    • Subject line
    • Pre-header text
    • Above the fold content that readers may be able to see
  • Be Obvious: People don’t want to guess at what you are trying to say or work too hard to find the information. Don’t put links too close together (this makes it hard to tap the right one) and use big images that people can easily tap.
  • Be Brief: Recipients will scan your content so make it easy for them to understand and engage. Hence, get to the point quickly. The goal is to get them to click through and take the desired action and if the goal is to get them to your website, I recommend not overwhelming them with information in the email. Sometimes, less is more.

Always (and we mean ALWAYS!) include a call to action and make it very easy for readers to know what you want them to do.

Know Your Purpose

It may seem like more work to have to craft several emails to go out each month but we can assure you that this email marketing strategy is better than sending out one email a month jammed with everything you want to say. Please don’t ignore all the tips we just gave you!

The main types of emails you could send out are:

  • Newsletter (monthly, bi-weekly)
  • Notifications (change it address, store hours, etc)
  • Transactional Emails (follow up on a recent visit or purchase or an abandoned online cart)
  • Marketing Emails (advertising a special offer or new product)

Picking an email marketing service that can help you deliver well designed emails is key.  A company like Constant Contact provides simple to use tools such as customizable templates, autoresponder capabilities, easy contact management, posting your emails to your social media accounts and tracking tools to understand the effectiveness of what you are sending out.

Embrace Autoresponder

What is an autoresponder?  An autoresponder is a sequence of email marketing messages that gets sent to subscribers in the order and frequency that you decide.  You can craft all the emails ahead of time and they will be sent out when you want them to be.  This is a great way to nurture your customer base and to also remind them of the knowledge you have and the solutions you can provide for them.

As mentioned above, an email marketing service like Constant Contact will have the ability to use an autoresponder to help you nurture your clients through email. Trust us, this is information you don’t want to skip over!  Autoresponder is an underutilized tool but one that can have fantastic results!

This is the place to showcase your best content!  Make your auto response emails useful and all about your customers. Use the data from your website to figure out what people want more information about and then give it to them!

Examples include:

  • A welcome email once they sign up for your subscriber list
  • More information about a product or service once you know they were visiting your website
  • Send out birthday or anniversary emails
  • Emails to those customers that haven’t made a purchase lately

You can watch a great video about the power of using autoresponder on the Constant Contact website.

There are so many ways to make email marketing work for you.  Measure Marketing works with businesses in, Mississauga, Oakville, Burlington, Guelph, Kitchener, London and Toronto area and can help you design email marketing campaigns that deliver results. Contact us to get started!