Note: This blog post is a sponsored conversation written by Lynn Smythe, the Founder and Chief Blogger for The Creative Cottage lifestyle blog. The opinions, thoughts, ideas and text are all mine.
When you’re focussing in on marketing, you need to know that the emails you’re sending out are hitting the spot, making the sort of mark they were designed to make and cutting through the swathes of marketing competition out there.
While creating the perfect email marketing campaign can take time, spending that time getting it right almost always pays off so make sure your process is well thought out and logical.
There’s a lot to get right from the best email marketing subject lines to getting that opening paragraph just so, so if you’re planning on kickstarting your marketing email campaign, take a look at our five top tips for getting it just right.
Know Your Audience
If you’re going to spend time doing anything, make sure it’s finding out everything on who it is you want to communicate with. The market research required to create buyer personas for your brand is well worth spending both time and money on, so don’t be afraid to invest in either.
If you don’t know who it is you’re talking to, then how will you communicate with them? You’re looking at finding out as much as you can about your audience and creating a marketing avatar that tells you what age, job, hobbies and social media your ideal customer hangs out on.
Use this information to tailor messages and take the guesswork out of who you’re aiming your products and your direct marketing at.
Email Marketing Content
Does your email marketing content reflect your readers interests? You know where they’re hanging out on social media and the kind of content they consumer regularly, so don’t even think about reinventing the wheel.
Creating great content and being clever is one thing, but if you’re not creating search engine optimized content and writing words that connect directly with you audience then they’re not going to give you a second chance. Instead, they’re going to take their custom elsewhere to a business that really gets them.
Show off your shared values and your put your writing where your research is, to ensure your content is considered a source of valued opinion.
The Customer Journey
It’s helpful to know what action you want your customer to take after reading each piece of content. It might be that you’re just about to embark on a series of emails that you hope will eventually lead to a sale made or a service signed up to. Whatever your reasoning, make sure that with each email you send out, you give a clear reason for its existence.
You want to issue a call of action (CTA) with every email whether that’s visiting your website, clicking on a specific offer or signing up for a newsletter, spell it out even if it seems obvious. You’ll also want to make doing that action as clear as possible too. Put more than one action button on your page to encourage at least one click by your reader.
Why Will They Open Your Email?
And not the the tens of other marketing email that fall into their inboxes every day? What is it about your unique offer that no one else can say they have?
Your subject line and email pre header is going to play a key role here. It needs to be powerful and compelling, it needs to be the subject line that makes it past the delete button and gets to that important point of being opened. How will you create this line?
By careful testing of your audience and by being clever, creative and original. Use humor, use emojis, use special offers and the lure of celebrity endorsement. Just use whatever it takes to make your subject line pop in a sea of subject line mediocrity. If you can’t decide between 2 subject lines, use both! A/B split testing is a great way to see what type of content gets better open rates for each of your brand personas.
Email Marketing Testing
If you think you’ve done everything just right, chances are you’ve overlooked a spelling mistake or there’s a vital piece of information missing. Don’t even consider sending out your marketing email without giving it a thorough testing first.
First of all, you’ll want to run your text through a sense checker, like Grammarly, or any online tool that will check for spelling, grammar and readability. Don’t be the one who lets spelling mistakes through, it makes your work seem unprofessional and your offer seem untrustworthy. Show that you are neither and let your content sparkle.
Then you’ll want to send some test emails out among your colleagues for feedback. Try and take any constructive criticism on board and remember that you are trying to send out the best product that you can. Make sure that you send a test version to yourself to determine that all the images, any imbedded images and hyperlinks work properly.
The great thing about sending out an email campaign that looks great and has the best content is that very often, direct marketing in this form works. You will be putting into practice everything you have found about your customer. You’ll be using images, language subject lines that they understand and relate to. You’ll be appealing to the values that make them want to open your email.
Get your direct email marketing campaign right and you’ll find your way into your customers’ inboxes and into their hearts. There are no hard and fast rules about how you go about this, just make it good and relevant. Want to use an emoji in the subject line? If you know that works for your customer then go for it.
Once you’re up and running don’t forget that monitoring needs to happen. You’ll be able to determine what percentage of emails were opened and how many were condemned to the trash can. If you’re not getting the open rate that you wanted then you need to call a halt to the proceedings to figure out what’s going on. Don’t be tempted to bombard your customer with more emails. If they aren’t interested in your first email, then chances are they’ll start to feel harassed.
Instead make the adjustments you need and try again. You get very few chances at making this initial breakthrough so far better to get it right first time.
Your campaign is set to be the one that takes your business forward, so take a deep breath and hit that send button.
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