Email marketing is a great inbound marketing tactic to help generate leads. Each distribution is all about increasing your open rate and click through rate. This is helped by creating engaging and relevant content to your target audience. Here, we cover some of the things for you to do in the future to help improve engagement for your next email send-out.
1. What’s the story?
Ultimately you want people to read your email. So, make your subject line clear, short & snappy and something that will grab attention so that recipients are enticed to open it. This is the first thing that will be seen. Tell people what’s on offer in the email to give them a reason to open.
2. People like people
We all like to think we’re talking to someone we know. So, make sure that the email sender is someone from the team rather than an ‘admin’ email address.
3. On brand
Keep your design and messaging on brand. If you’re starting to regularly send out e.g., a round-up of news on a monthly basis then make sure that you create a template in keeping with your brand and stick to that format. People like familiarity and it helps to build trust.
4. Keep content relevant and original
Keep content relevant, original and regular. Once your recipient clicks on your email you need to get to the point quickly. What is the main message of this email?
Maybe it is an interesting business update with statistics. Perhaps you have an offer they should know about but make sure that you explain how this offer can truly help them to encourage click throughs.
Try and make sure that any email you distribute points back to a blog post on your website, offer or download. In fact, you can save time by re-purposing content based on the many blogs you have already created.
5. Calls to Action
Once you’ve decided on the theme of your email, you need to let the recipient know what to do next. This is where you need a bold call to action (CTA). Be clear on what you want the recipient to do, whether to ‘download now’ or ‘register today’ adding a link back to your website.
6. Links
Include links back to your website as well as all your social icons to encourage people to follow and share on social.
7. Be image led
You’ll often hear us talk about being image led which is really important for email marketing. It’s eye-catching, helps to break up text on the page allowing the recipient to easily read through the content.
8. Unsubscribe
You always need to give the option for a recipient to unsubscribe. Add a link to this at the end of your email, it’s a necessary requirement so don’t miss it off. Whilst sad when someone does unsubscribe, look at it positively as it means that your email list is much more targeted.
9. When to email
Once you’ve got the email set up, send it at an optimal time. According to Hubspot the highest click-to-open rates for an email are 10am midweek. We would suggest Tuesday and Thursday’s as a good option.
Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is an effective way of working out the best day to send an email marketing campaign. Send out groups of emails on different days and compare performance, with the best performing group giving you an indication of when clients are willing to receive emails.
Email marketing agency Croydon
If you need a helping hand building an email marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign! As email marketing experts in Croydon, we can create your initial email template, write content and distribute to your database.
Other digital marketing tactics we offer include web design and development, SEO services, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.