Mar­ket­ing Emails That Work, And Why Most Don’t!

For a ma­jor­ity of us, the first thing we see when we open our mail­boxes every­day are umpteen emails promis­ing us the best of­fer in town.

There are some re­ally cheap houses on sale, peo­ple of­fer­ing to boost your Credit score in 24 hours and a 90% dis­count on de­signer wear!

To add more spice to the view, there are a few guys in­ter­ested in send­ing you a mil­lion dol­lars you won in the re­cent Mi­crosoft lottery.

Well, most of these emails get trashed, with you winc­ing about what a waste of time it was, ex­cept you hop­ing that there WAS a Lot­tery you’d won!

There­fore, if you need to get into email mar­ket­ing, there a few ac­tion items that you must do and lot of pit­falls you must avoid.

Here’s an in­ter­est­ing pre­sen­ta­tion on Email Mar­ket­ing Tips:

The ar­ti­cle be­low is go­ing to talk about the sub­ject in more detail.

The Com­mon Pitfalls

Avoid Pushy Sub­ject Lines

Sub­ject Lines need to be crisp and com­pelling, how­ever they must not be preachy and sound too good to be true. Oth­er­wise, peo­ple are just go­ing to re­ject it as a Scam or a Spam and move on! For ex­am­ple, let’s an­a­lyze the two sub­ject lines below:

“Free Credit Score Check - Click Now be­fore it’s too late!!!” – No­tice the ex­tra ex­cla­ma­tion marks, they tell the reader that the sender is try­ing too hard, and the reader will au­to­mat­i­cally think this is un­be­liev­able. The ti­tle here looks more like a worm on a fish hook, and will make the reader think, “You got the wrong fish, buddy!”

“Credit Score – Know yours in 4 min­utes” – No­tice how the ti­tle is brief and promises a ben­e­fit that looks be­liev­able. Sec­ondly, an ab­stract num­ber in the sub­ject stops wan­der­ing eyes and helps them to fo­cus. You are more likely to click here.

The idea is that we show the reader some­thing great yet be­liev­able in the ti­tle, and then de­liver them more than what we promised in the body of the email. This cus­tomer de­light tech­nique will cer­tainly work in your favor.

Power of the First Impression

If you look back, any good book which caught your fancy and had you stay­ing up all night read­ing it, had an im­pres­sive or in­trigu­ing open­ing. Mar­ket­ing emails work in the same way, your email must have an open­ing which cap­tures the reader’s at­ten­tion and en­cour­ages him to read on.

You need to fo­cus on writ­ing short but im­pact­ful sen­tences. In the first few lines, sell the ben­e­fits but don’t try to push the prod­uct. Avoid flashy col­ors and text in mul­ti­ple fonts and sizes which ticks peo­ple off. Use a bal­anced color scheme easy on the eyes.

One Size Fits All. Really?

In the land of Email Mar­ket­ing, this is the most com­mon and the gravest folly of all, where mar­keters ob­tain loads of email ad­dresses, get a com­mon tem­plate for all, and then use soft­ware which places the customer’s name mul­ti­ple times in the email and send out email blasts to all in one go!

Sounds pro­duc­tive, but, far from it, this is the most dis­re­spect­ful thing to do. Peo­ple can read through and un­der­stand that your “ro­botic” email is a prod­uct of mass mail­ing. Sec­ondly, with­out proper cat­e­go­riza­tion of your prospects, it is hard to as­sume what they need and what they would find to be of value.

Keep it Short and Sim­ple, Silly (KISSS)

Email mar­ket­ing is not like a pie eat­ing con­test, where more is bet­ter. You are more likely to win more prospects if your con­tent is brief, well struc­tured, pro­motes the ben­e­fits and is suc­cinctly put. Hence stay away from overtly lengthy para­graphs and stay true to the ben­e­fits of the prod­uct and the value it has for the reader.

Some Es­sen­tial Must Do’s

Find the right eye to buy

Email Mar­ket­ing should be di­rected only to your tar­get au­di­ence. A smart way of do­ing it is get­ting peo­ple to sign in to your news let­ter on your website.

Of­fer peo­ple a chance to view a sam­ple news let­ter, so that they know what they are sign­ing up for. Sev­eral medium to large scale or­ga­ni­za­tions are us­ing email cam­paign man­agers, such as Adobe Cam­paign, which works on tar­geted seg­men­ta­tion, im­proved de­liv­ery rates and en­hanced reporting.

Learn more about it here:

https://www.adobe.com/solutions/campaign-management.html

Please re­fer to the be­low grid which talks about get­ting a per­mis­sion based list for your campaigns.

The ma­jor three questions

Now that you have your tar­gets ready, the next step is to put to­gether a com­pelling copy. For that, you need to ask your­self three questions:

1. What is the email about? – Is there clar­ity of thought in the email con­tent, and is the email clearly out­lin­ing it’s purpose?
2. What’s in it for the reader? – Does the email clearly show the ben­e­fits and value proposition?
3. What do you want the reader to do? – Is there a link, where they can go to buy, or send an en­quiry? Sec­ondly, is the process easy to fol­low? (You don’t want your cus­tomer to be do­ing all the work!)

Give a clear deadline

Email Mar­ket­ing mails that work of­ten, of­fer a dead­line to the prospect and stress upon what the reader might miss out on if the dead­line is crossed. An ex­am­ple of a good line is below:

“We of­fer you the Up­graded Home Blender at 55% Off for $41.99 – Of­fer valid till ¹²⁄₂₅ only, or till Santa takes our stock away!”

Be the resolver

Most peo­ple don’t like com­pli­ca­tions, chal­lenges or bot­tle­necks in life. Talk about the prob­lem ar­eas your prospect might be fac­ing, and then present the so­lu­tion. Peo­ple value some­one who of­fers them a way out of their prob­lems, be it their credit, long queues at the mall, or their belly fat!

Video in Email

Keep­ing up with the cur­rent trends, noth­ing works bet­ter than an at­trac­tive video in the email. This will urge peo­ple to visit your web­site and will lead to prospects and con­ver­sion. What has worked well are cus­tomer tes­ti­mo­ni­als. Smiles work, in emails and in life!

A re­cent sur­vey of top mar­keters re­vealed that over 65% ob­served that video emails could have a mod­er­ate to sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on con­ver­sion rates, and those are re­as­sur­ing figures!

Here’s a video that can help you to learn how to em­bed video in an email.

Make sure your email gets through the spam filters

All that we’ve dis­cussed so far is only good when you’ve made every­thing pos­si­ble to make sure your email gets through the spam fil­ters, which is­n’t al­ways the case. You can ba­si­cally spend days and weeks de­vis­ing a strat­egy that works, but if you don’t take care of the te­chini­cal is­sue that can re­sult in your emails get­ting to the spam bin, you are well on the way to fail­ure. In our ar­ti­cle on email deiver­abil­ity we cov­ered te­chini­cal as­pects of email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns that you should take care of. These is­sues are bet­ter to be re­solved to­gether with the web­mas­ter or ad­min of your website.

Hope the dis­cussed points will make your email cam­paign more pro­duc­tive. Good Luck in your email mar­ket­ing endeavors!