If there’s one message that we hope you take away from our Email Marketing Basics series, its that there’s much more that goes into an sophisticated and effective email campaign than just hitting “send.”
By this step in a thoughtful and results-oriented campaign, you have already set your campaign goals, chosen the type of email campaign to execute, and building your email list. Now let’s tackle the art of crafting the content and tone of your email before you send it out to your audience. . .
Five Email Marketing Tips
First and foremost on the list: Simplicity. Keeping your content clear and concise in is absolutely key. No one wants to read through a long email, especially if it’s not organized and coherent. When necessary, be sure that your Call to Action (CTA) is very easy for them to do and with as few steps as possible. Any steps they need to take should preferably be automated wherever possible. The overall tone should be engaging, relevant, and to-the-point.
Second: always include visual media. That means your email should have some images, videos, or other relevant graphics. We have consistently seen time and time again not only in our own professional campaigns but also with our colleagues across the online marketing industry that email campaigns do a better job holding your attention when they include the right kinds of media and are balanced appropriately with text. The idea here is to engage the reader visually (and most people are visual learners) but not to distract from the point.
Third: personalize. Our team recommends utilizing opportunities to personalize mass emails but in tasteful ways. It can sometimes be a judgment call that you develop a sense for as you run enough email campaigns, but there is certainly an invisible line between effective and tacky. This is because nowadays there’s an abundance of software and mass email services that have these features available and, as with most things in marketing, they are often overused (think of the political emails that often end up on our spam list). So that’s where the human touch of personal experience makes a difference, leaning on earned instincts on what the best way to communicate your message on a case-by-case basis is. General rules matter, but so does the personal touch.
These three steps will serve you well in setting up just about any email marketing campaign. Of course, there are many more steps and factors that will help you go the extra mile. Bonus tip: one of these factors is timing. Even the best-composed email blast can fall flat if it comes at the wrong time, and this is something that we can help account for in several ways. As marketing specialists, we have access to data that helps us know the best local times in the day and week to send emails to add yet another layer to boost the likelihood of being opened. Bonus tip #2: related to timing, we recommend keeping general tabs with national news in order to make some basic judgment calls in case something major has happened that would render your email irrelevant or likely to be ignored.
However, at the end of the day you can set up the very best email campaign on paper with the best wording, visual media, promo offers, balance between valuable information and punchiness, and timing — all catered perfectly to each individual reader — and still fail. There’s no way to avoid failure with absolute certainty, but experience matters and there’s many pitfalls into failure that we can avoid. Remember: email campaigns, like all marketing, are about reaching the big picture of your intended goals. That means we’re going for overall effectiveness and accounting for any points along the way where targets aren’t met. Naturally, we still need to be vigilant of the many factors that go into these campaigns and learn from each result.
While there are many more moving parts involved, these five basic tips will help you have a much better understanding of what goes into an effective email marketing campaign. If you decide to hire experienced experts, one major advantage is the sophisticated resources they have, including fine-tuned auto-response features and detailed data on who opens the emails and who responds to the Call to Action. From these results, we can perform crucial analysis that crunches these figures and find the solutions to drive the best possible results for you depending on your goals. Experts can also conduct the regular maintenance of your email lists that keep them relevant to your objectives.
Bringing in specialists and experts makes a big difference in the success of your campaign. If you need help getting results with your email campaign, reach us at 866-DAVIDAXEL (866-328-4329) or dave@davidaxel.com
