31 May Top 5 tips for a successful email marketing campaign
There are many types of email marketing you may consider utilising to promote your business, but the key to success in any email marketing is understanding the basics. Be it a newsletter, event, product or service, it is vital you understand your audience and establish a clear message and call to action. With this in mind, we’ve outlined our top five tips for creating a successful email marketing campaign:
Subject line
As the first thing your audience sees, the subject line is arguably the most important part of your email. It will determine how many people deem your email worthy of opening. Not only this but the subject line plays a big part in actually getting your email in front of your audience, past spam filters. It’s important to consider something relevant and catchy that people will be enticed to click on but at the same time avoids instant spam triggers for example; numbers, the word ‘free’ and punctuation or symbols such as ‘£’ are a no go.
Copy
Make sure your content is relevant to the database you are using and aligned with the subject line to minimise the number of people unsubscribing. Prior to writing your copy, you must decide what it is you wish to convey to your audience. It is far more important to be clear than to bombard them with bells and whistles for their entertainment, so be sure to prioritise clarity above all else. Focusing your message will keep your marketing campaign relevant, keep your audience engaged and reduce the risk of rambling and losing the point of your message.
Design
It’s also imperative to keep your audience visually engaged. This is your opportunity to showcase your brand in its best light, through creativity. A design that is 50% copy and 50% image will keep your audience captivated throughout. A prominent logo should appear at the forefront, so your audience associates your brand with the messaging. There are many options for colour and while you will want to use colours in-keeping with your brand, you may also want to experiment with other colours; for example, orange is statistically the most clicked colour, whereas red and yellow are associated with power, passion and energy. If you don’t have an in-house design team, its advisable to consult a professional designer.
Call to action
Depending on the nature of your email campaign, you’ll almost certainly want your audience to respond in some way. Whether you want to drive them to your website, get them to subscribe, capture their details or shop, you need to provide them with a way of completing this action. Your call to action should be prominent, with clear instructions. If your audience has read the copy, are engaged with your design and have remained interested, the next logical step would be to follow up with an action. Include multiple calls to action, with one in the top fold of the email as well as at the bottom. It is wise to also include a link to your website, as well as links to your social media platforms, to make yourself as accessible as possible.
Statistics
Too many companies are failing to get the best results from their email marketing campaigns as they don’t have a plan in place for following up. If the email was sent to your own database, you really must analyse the statistics and create a follow-up campaign to avoid missing out on people who may have opened, clicked but not completed the desired action. Whether this is through a personalised follow up email responding to the area they showed interest in, or physically picking up the phone and speaking to them directly to get the desired result, if you have their details make sure you use them.
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