Think what makes a great gift card. Is it the design, or is it the message? The answer is as usual: neither and both right at once. Same rules pretty much apply to email, it’s all about the overall execution and there is no single silver bullet that can pretty much guarantee you the success.
When composing an email campaign you should really treat it as a gift-card designer, everything needs to be perfect, from simply your choice of font to color pallet. And by the way, designing a gift-card is no easy job.
Email is among the oldest forms of digital marketing that was promised to die off with the explosion of social media. But that never happened, and it is still considered to be one of the most effective and one of the least costly methods of reaching to your audience.
Typically, when constructing an email campaign, people pay attention to wrong things altogether. They try to add flashy animations, fancy features and completely forget about the very basics. So today we’ll focus on the top 8 essential things that immediately separate winning email marketing from mediocre.
Top 10 Tips for Creating a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
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Short and strong subject lines
This is the very first thing that a reader will see, even before he or she will open the email. And the subject line is number one factor in making a decision whether the email is worthy of an opening in the first place. So keep the subject line short and make sure it packs a punch.
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Clean layout
You should be keeping your layout as simple as possible, without overloading it with infographics, huge fonts, and other unnecessarily complicated items. Your email needs to be clean and readable first and good-looking only second. A busy layout with numerous things all at once will only confuse your recipients and scare them off.
- Communicate beyond the sales pitch
There is nothing more annoying than receiving a purely sales-pitch email. Everyone has experienced it before and we all did the same thing at the end – move to spam/trash. Nowadays, people can see advertising everywhere and concealing it is virtually impossible. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be trying to sell your product or service. It’s just that you need to do it in an engaging fashion that lets customers participate.
Sending out surveys, invitation to take part in viral contests and other forms of interactive content works much better than your typical “buy now, limited time only”.
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Pay attention to Un-subscribers
Although this sounds simple, not many businesses are really looking this way. In most cases, people look only at what’s going right and turn the blind eye to what’s fundamentally wrong with a campaign.
If people are leaving – then you need to stop doing whatever makes them leave, even if it worked well in the past.
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Mobile first
Over 90% of your customer base will use smartphones to check the email, so you better make sure that it is mobile-friendly. Today, a campaign cannot perform well if it not optimized to display on mobile devices.
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Testing & analytics
Before ever pressing the “send” button, you need to make sure that everything is in order. Make sure that your entire email is visible on multiple devices. Also, you would want to test your emails to ensure that they can go through most common spam filters.
And after you launch your campaign, be sure to analyze its performance on a variety of levels. You need to have tools in place to track sales and conversions generated from the campaign.
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Multiple calls-to-action
The entire purpose of the email campaign is to have audience do something, whether it will be to follow a link to a blog post or filling out a survey. The longer you stay engaged with a customer, the more likely they are to buy a product and return for more.
It’ always a good idea to provide multiple means of communication, as it gives your audience a choice. In addition to email, provide a phone number and social shares buttons as alternative ways for a customer to respond.
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Ask away, don’t be shy
Another common mistake that everyone seems to make is being shy, even when the audience is enjoying the email newsletter. For some reasons, we are fine asking customers to buy our product and services but we are not fine asking to add your send address to their email contacts list.
Why so? The more people you can get adding your address, the more you advance your campaign deliverability. The main question is, what are you going to lose after all? Undoubtedly you’ve sent out an email with an offer that a customer has rejected, but kept opening the newsletter next week anyway.
One of the most effective ways to improve your email campaign, especially if you run a small business, is by using marketing automation software. Automated emails, with right configuration (usually that include personalization), get almost 200% higher click rates when compared to the traditional campaign. Not to mention that automating email marketing can reduce costs by as much as 80%.
The very best marketing automation software for small business would allow your marketing department to streamline operation, spend more time on improving the overall strategy, while at the same time cutting down costs.
One of the best ways you can advance your campaign to the next level is through integrating it to your CRM system, as it allows a seamless connection between your sales and marketing departments. And as the number 1 CRM in the world, Salesforce email marketing provides numerous possibilities for businesses to take their campaign to next level.
With integration in place, you will have a direct and up-to-date access to your customers and leads database, which in turn can easily speed up the process of creating and personalizing email marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing Automation Platform by OMI
If your business is interested in running an effective email marketing campaign that can incorporate all of the above and features beyond, like benefits of video marketing for small businesses, then contact us at OMI.