8 Ways To Improve Effectiveness Of Your Marketing Emails

A lot of organizations/brands take email marketing for granted – even though it is the most frequently used communication medium by businesses today. Email marketing or email direct marketing is not as simple as knowing what information to send, drafting it into a template that is followed for all marketing communications and sending it across to a database of target audience. Email is one of the most powerful marketing tools that an organization can leverage on and making it more efficient is one way to ensure that your customers are updated and that you get more brand awareness. I’ve listed 8 simple ways to ensure that your emails are more efficient:

Ensure that the email is opened:

1. The sender address / from field: Your customer will open the mail only if it is from a trusted source. It becomes very important that a good choice of sender name is used and done so consistently. Ensure that sender name is visible, trustworthy and recognizable. Do not use vague, spam-like or computer-generated email addresses like ER-mailinglist-09-13@xyz.com. Remember: consistency is key – do not customize from fields for every message or even campaigns. For example: a bank could use a sender name such as yourcreditcard@abcbank.com for all credit card related communication – be it offers, reward points or product enhancements.

2. The subject line: Probably one of the most important components of an email/newsletter, the subject line almost always determines if an email will be opened by your customer or not. The most obvious thing to avoid is the spam filter – to avoid all caps and exclamation marks is one way to do this. There are many spam trigger words that you must avoid in your subject line – you can find a list of most of these words on Mail Chimp or HubSpot. Your subject line should be clear and self-explanatory – most subject lines end up being vague and ambiguous in an attempt of being creative. An apt subject line of Gmail inbox would be 50 characters (around 7 words) long. Also, making the subject line more relevant with geo-coding could improve open rates – this is also true if your subject line talks about specific product categories. For e.g.: if you are a bank emailing your credit card customers, then segmenting and targeting emails by credit card categories (Premium, Student, etc.) can lead to higher open rates by virtue of exclusivity.

Ensure that the mail is read after being opened:

1. Body Copy: This is the body of the email based on which you expect your customer to respond. The body copy of your email must be relevant, timely, convincing and targeted at the right customer segment in the right tone. It should be concise but must provide a compelling case so that customer is engaged. It is best to avoid going in to the depth of everything and if it is necessary, then provide links for more information.

   While drafting the body copy, ensure that there is enough white space - send separate mails if there is too much information to be communicated but do not turn your customers off with a cluttered email because it is important that the customer clearly understands the core value derived from the offering in the mail.

   Another important factor to keep in mind is that even if image download is disabled, the email must make sense – designing an email in which the text is part of the image section of the body copy might not be the best idea in such cases. It is a good practice to create a text version of the email along with the HTML message, to cater to customers who resort to email clients that do not support HTML

2. Call-To-Action: This is the most important component of a promotional email and the underlying purpose behind sending the email. CTA is a response from the customer - a click to convert tool. In other words, what is it that you want your customers to do after reading your email? That is what a call-to-action is. This could be a link or a tab or a button that you want the customer to click that would lead to the next stage in the conversion funnel. Placement, language, extra Information, size and colour matters when it comes to the CTA.

   As a general rule it helps if the CTA is visible as soon as the mail is opened, so it’s best placed above the digital fold (or, the preview pane). It is best to use short (two or three words), active and urgent-sounding language for the CTA; for e.g.: Click here, Call now, etc. The CTA should be visible and distinct from the body of the mail - so a different colour or a slightly larger font could help. In most cases, a brief one liner on the benefits of completing the CTA mentioned along with helps in your customer clicking on it.

3. Use of image in an email: An image greatly helps the impact of an email. However, there should be a good balance of image and text in your email (all image and no text can go wrong if the image doesn’t load properly). Since most emails are read on mobile devices these days, it goes without saying that emails should be mobile optimized (600 pixels is the ideal width for mobile friendly emails). Personally, I believe that big images should be used only for mails that appeal to the emotional side of the customer. Emails regarding travel privileges, dining offers or shopping rewards can visually show a customer how such services makes life easier for a customer - it makes sense to use larger images for such mails to appeal to the emotional side of the customer. Informational mails or mails conveying messages where customers are more likely to arrive at a rational decision should have more text than images as it is necessary that maximum information is conveyed without the image hampering the email reading experience.

4. Brand logo: Logos should be placed on top of the mail to instantly recognize the brand if the customer is skimming through mails via the preview pane or viewing mails without returning to the inbox view. Branding should run throughout the mail in the form of colors and consistent fonts.

5. Unsubscribe link: I believe this is an important factor majorly because you do not want to target customers who are not interested in you. It goes without saying that you must ensure the unsubscribe link is not broken and leads to a valid landing page when clicked. While it is important to keep the unsubscribe process easy, you could also try to retain customers through alternative ways. Include options to opt-down before the opt-out option. For example, maybe the customer would want to hear about offers and deals on a particular product category but would like to not be sent promotional mails about brand events. A feedback section can be included in the landing page to track customer preferences and fine tune the email marketing process. I have used the unsubscribe process of the M&S newsletter as an example

   

6. Links to social media sites: Email marketing and social media should go hand in hand for a brand/organization. Include links to your website and social media pages in your email and put up the link to the email subscription page on your social media sites/your website – also ensure that campaigns/marketing communications are consistent on all platforms. However, while doing this, also ensure that the social media links/ buttons are not given prominence over your CTA.

In addition to all this, make sure you treat your customers with respect. Personalizing your emails can go a long way in making sure your emails are read – in fact personalization of the subject line can greatly improve the open rate, as long as the content inside the mail is truly relevant to the customer. You don’t want your customer feeling fooled when he opens an email that reads “Hey Bob! This information could change your life” only to realize the body of the mail is generalized. These are just some very simple ways in which you can improve the look and feel of your emails – what might seem to be very small and simple changes can actually go a long way in improving your overall marketing communications!