How-To Maximize Your Email Marketing

Do you ever get the feeling that you are sending dozens of emails to your customers, employees and potential clients and no one is reading them? At the monthly meetings your employees look at you with perplexed expressions when you reference something from an email and yet another customer is surprised by a sale you know you told them about. Email marketing is a highly effective method of reaching your clients who may not come into stores as often, promoting deals, sales and loyalty rewards can often rely on this digital platform. So how can you write your emails to communicate your point, engage your audience, and ensure that they read the next emails following. Strategic timing, brevity, on point tone and a hook line for both the subject of the email and the body of the email. In this article, we will cover the basics of email sending and how to optimize the outcomes of your emails to lure in potential clients and retain those you have.

Have you ever been overly inundated by emails from one particular company, the emails are essentially fluff, pushing similar or the same product multiple times a day? How many of those do you actually read and follow through on by clicking or responding? If you are the average American, not very often. While we all want to be exposed to deals, not many of us want to be spammed by a company. If you are promoting your product or communicating the same point to staffers more than once a day, it might be time to look at your emails critically. Could you have consolidated the emails into one email that had all the necessary details? If the answer here is yes, this is the first step you should take to maximize your emails and keep your customers on your mailing list. Creating large generic email services that allow you to reach out to your customers is an excellent and sometimes even free way of promotion, over using it will land you in their spam or trash box, or they could opt out of the email, meaning you are losing a viable connection to that customer. The first point here in optimizing emails is that you can communicate a point, catch and sustain attention, without hitting the send button 4 plus times a day.

So now we are down to just one email, and the temptation may be to overload that email with heaps of content, flowery language, and unnecessary explanations. Brevity, in emails, is paramount to sending a successful message. Who is your target audience, what are you trying to sell, and why should they buy it? Address these points in 15-30 lines (depending on your market), and for what you can’t type and say, use graphics. Your email click through rate depends more heavily on the graphics that appeal to your audience than having a lot of written content. Breaking up the text with relevant, eye-catching and clickable graphics will boost your interaction on emails significantly. If you are in the retail industry err towards minimal text, you are selling a product, so advertisement should be image heavy with a focus on drawing the customers eyes into pop-up words and deals.

Speaking of pop words, you have drafted your short and colorful email, and you are getting ready to send, but you need a subject line. Much like having pop words, your subject line is what is going to draw in your customer’s attention. Make sure the subject matches the overall content, don’t advertise a deal and then only talk about the background of your business in the email. You are also going to want to develop a hook for your clients. Your hook subject should be short, concise and to the point, you want your email recipient to click on it to hear more about what you have to offer. If you were missing your flowery language as you were writing your email, here is the time to break out some adjectives and attract the customer’s eye. Who is your audience? If it is a younger generation look into services that allow you to put emoticons into the subject, these graphics distinguish your email from the onslaught of plain text emails they receive daily.

You’ve got your hook, you’ve got your draft, you are perilously close to hitting send, but hold off. Emails are something we often blow through quickly, it’s short and often easy to write, but because of that it’s normally riddled with bad grammar, spelling mistakes, and incorrect dates and times. You don’t want to have to send a follow-up email saying, whoops! The giant sale starts tomorrow, not next week! So make sure you get a second pair of eyes on your email. They should be looking for punctuation, grammar, content, and almost as important, tone. Before we segue into tone, let’s quickly talk about the structure. Remember back in primary school when your teacher drilled in intro, body, conclusion, as a way to write essays? The same logic should apply to your email, but far briefer. Just because it’s 15 lines doesn’t mean it shouldn’t communicate a clear narrative from start to finish. Introduce your purpose, justify it’s relevance to your recipient, and close with a reminder of the purpose. This type of narrative will guide the reader through your message and have them clicking on links for more details.

Now that we have covered the logistics of how to set up an email, let’s talk about bringing customers in and keeping them there. The tone is a huge aspect to how an email is received and whether or not your client will interact with your online marketing. Think about the tone of your company, is it youthful, fun, upbeat or does it offer more serious, business-focused, and traditional services? Have the tone of your email match the tone of your company, this carries through the narrative that you have set up for your clients. Your clients will read into your tone, so you want to make sure you are putting forth the best image. Is there exclamation marks, many hard stop periods, does the author of the email come across as sincere? Psychology Today reminds us that email tones have a strong influence on the recipient’s’ response. Depending on the type of email you are sending have someone look over your language, if you are trying to implore your client to buy a product or service you will want a friendlier and open tone. Language can communicate this sincerity and lead you to a successful email marketing strategy.

This may seem like a lot of work for what was supposed to be an easy email marketing campaign, but these emails are highly effective ways of communicating your brand and showing off your products. By staying on point with the rest of your industry and having professional and appropriate emails you will garner more client interaction and interest, which is great for your sales and brand!