Email Marketing: Plan, Build, and Blast Off!

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Discover the Top 10 Ways to Skyrocket Your Email Marketing Campaigns

In all our years of partnering with businesses to assist in their digital marketing success, we’ve learned the #1 Rule for email marketing campaigns. ‘Stick to Best Practices!’ Like with SEO, website development, and lead generation campaigns, adhering to the current and most effective practices the industry puts in place will always be your best bet!

Take a Closer Look!

Jump to the 10 ways to skyrocket your email campaigns.

1. Start with a Welcome
2. On-Point Personalization
3. Seductive Subject Lines, Images, and Pretext
4. The Briefer, the Better
5. Always Call-to-Action
6. Mobile-Friendly Matters
7. Share This!
8. Easy Unsubscribe
9. Analytics is a Must
10. Keep It Clean- Your Email List
11. BONUS: Explore options w/BUILDINGBLOCKS

Check out these resources from BUILDINGBLOCKS!

Up Sales with Email Marketing Automation

Kick-@$$ Email Marketing Campaigns

1.  Establish immediate rapport with your subscribers by sending them an initial ‘Welcome’ email.

Once a subscriber has opted in to receive your emails, send a welcome email! E-Welcomes help make quick connections with your audience. They also inform them about what to expect from your company and how often.

E-Welcomes are a significant best practice because they typically have a 50% open rate, generating 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than regular e-campaigns! To leverage this percentage to your advantage, offer relevant, valuable, and well-branded information that connects to their emotions.

You can also:

• Share company stories— Identify common values
• Provide case studies— Pluck their heartstrings
• Offer one-time discounts or promotional items— People LOVE to feel special
• Ask for their email marketing needs and preferences— People LOVE to tell you what they want/need

Those ideas help accomplish two critical things, ensuring they open your emails:

1. Establishes an immediate connection
2. Peaks their interest to wanting more

2.  Make your email marketing campaigns personalized, segmented, and conversational!

Be they ‘salesy’ or ‘highly formal,’ those stiff, dry, and detached emails won’t do! Building an immediate connection with subscribers through personalization and segmentation will always generate a higher open and click-through rate. To accomplish this, the simplest method is to address recipients by their first name in the emails. Yet, there is much more to do to capture and engage today’s subscribers.

Sagis Diagnostics: Strategic email marketing campaign- March 2023.

Let’s talk about tailored personalization with audience segmentation.

Audience segmentation has over 14% higher open rates compared to non-segmented campaigns! And with today’s email marketing automation technology, you can incorporate powerful advanced features with your e-blasts that help further tailor messages to each recipient and focus your campaigns. So, it’s a MUST-HAVE to help ensure continued group appeal and present value to your subscribers. Below are a few trending examples.

Tailor-made Cookies!

When your emails integrate with various pages on your website, you can use website cookies and begin sending emails based on their browsing behaviors on your site.

Party Like It’s Your Birthday!

Collecting birth-dates from subscribers provides another great way to send personal emails and offer them something special.

Keep it Casual and Conversational!

More people today are turned off by cold, disconnected, and formal emails. Instead, they prefer straight talk and that you “get to the point” as quickly and as effectively as possible. So, it’s always best to convey comforting, relatable messages and speak the subscriber’s language. Lastly, use a natural conversational flow, like I’ve written here! 😊 People will engage more in content that’s easy to read and comes from a trusted friend or advisor.

3.  Are you using compelling subject lines, insightful preview texts, and images in all your email marketing campaigns?

If not, your emails could quickly become e-misses! I’ve discovered once I’ve crafted the right subject line or header with an awesome preview text, I’ve gotten the hardest part of writing the email accomplished! The header will always guide me on what I need to communicate in the email, but an intriguing one will always catch the reader’s eye!

The bottom line about subject lines:

Creating captivating subject lines is vital to the open rate of every email campaign. And the reason for this is that e-blasts without relevant subjects quickly get smothered amid other messages or have the potential to pop up in spam or junk mail. You don’t want that for your emails!

Consider these six essential tips:

• Keep subject lines at 9 words or less.
• Although emojis are super effective, don’t go overboard. 😊
• Write and craft your email messages like a copywriter; ask yourself, ‘What would get YOU to read the email?’
• ALL CAPS, bolds, and exclamation overload (!!!!!) are unnecessary!
• Keep the subject line relevant! If your email is about your website, don’t make the subject line about a service.
• Images are a MUST-HAVE. They should support the intriguing subject line and help compel readers to open their mail.

Business email with subject line and preview text that turned into a marketing blog!

Let’s talk about email marketing preview texts.

Your preview text serves as a subtitle to the subject line, and it, too, needs to be on point. Pretexts are like 1-line summaries of the entire email, so make them grand. So, customize the preview line to ensure it further lures the reader into opening the email. Lastly, use this second line to help subscribers see how the subject applies to them. For instance:

1. Give a taste of what they can do in the email.
2. Share how the issue provides a solution to a problem.
3. Convey that the email is a continuation or a response to a previous subject.
4. Notify them of something innovative or exciting.
5. Share the end-result or final detail/outcome to compel them to read further.
6. Make sure the image also matches and intrigues, similar to the preview text.

4.  Keep your email marketing campaigns short, sweet, and ‘skimmable!’

I know; this blog is full of words I’ve been making up along the way, like— ‘e-welcome,’ ‘e-miss,’ and ‘skimmable!’ Yet, I pray you’re enjoying reading it as much as I’m enjoying writing it. According to a recent email study, over 121 business and retail emails are sent and received daily. And with all the pile-up messages people find in their inboxes, keeping your emails brief and on-point up their chances of being opened.

So, what’s a short email? According to Jason Hamilton, 200 words or less means you’ve reached the e-spot. But if you end up writing an essay-sized e-blast, it better be GREAT enough to keep them engaged. And don’t make a habit of doing that unless your subscribers are “into it.” I always say, ‘If it’s too long, blog it. And if you still want to email it, pull 175 of your most vital words from the blog to blast it.’ 

Along with the email being short and sweet, ask yourself, ‘Is it skimmable?’

Consider This: Would you enjoy reading through tons of paragraphs from 30 different emails every day? Most likely, your answer is “No.” So, it’s best to keep this in mind for your recipients.

People prefer emails with easy-to-read headers, well-spaced sections, bullets, numbers/steps, and CTA buttons. If they can quickly skim the content, you’ve made their lives much easier. In addition, you’ve also opened the opportunity for them to decide if your email is worth reading!

5.  Your email campaigns should always ‘Call People to Action’ with a CTA.

To me, an email without a call-to-action (CTA) is like—

• Serving someone a delicious meal without any eating utensils
• Meeting who you believe is the “love of your life” and not exchanging phone numbers
• Leading a thirsty horse to water with nothing for them to drink

When blasting an awesome business email, make sure subscribers have the opportunity to get more information, connect, make a purchase, or gain resources and solutions. CTAs help build your database and offer recipients, customers, and potential clients options to engage further.

In addition, always consider these three key tips:

1. Keep CTAs under five words and concise so subscribers know exactly what they need to do and where the link will take them.
2. Be sure to avoid utilizing misleading CTAs. That’s a massive turn-off for people, and they likely won’t trust anything else you send them.
3. Lastly, use big CTA buttons with a link that people can click on to access more information.

6.  Emails should be responsive and optimized for Smartphone usage.

People rely on their smartphones¹ more than ever, and why not? It’s super convenient as a powerful tool for accessing and sharing information, and for making transactions. And since more than 41% of opened emails come from people using their mobile devices, ensuring your emails are optimized and responsive for phones only makes sense.

The best way to ensure optimization is to subscribe to marketing platforms with responsive design templates promoting functionality and aesthetics across all devices.

7.  Allow subscribers to SHARE emails; people love that option!

Although people can easily forward an email to someone, the share option provides a far better opportunity for distributing your emails to a broader audience. And fortunately, there are a few email marketing platforms that allow share distribution option buttons.

Through these platforms, subscribers can also click share buttons to distribute links and share on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

8.   Make it easy and convenient for people to unsubscribe; they’ll love that even more!

Just as easy as company followers can subscribe to your newsletter for insights and updates, it should also be easy for them to unsubscribe. The unfortunate reality of email marketing is that people may not always want to stay on your mailing list, and a varied percentage will eventually unsubscribe. However, you can take the opportunity to send a “Farewell Confirmation” note to thank them for the opportunity to market to them.

But the worst thing a business can do is make it difficult for people to unsubscribe by using ‘warning language’ to communicate that their opting out is a mistake. We’ve learned the best businesses will avoid the following tactics when recipients want to unsubscribe:

1. Not having an ‘Unsubscribe’ option button
2. Making the button hard to find
3. Requiring people to email the company in order to unsubscribe
4. Requesting feedback via survey questions before they opt-out

Overall, keeping the unsubscribe option in the footer of every email keeps you in compliance with the law and leaves a lasting positive impression on recipients who may eventually come back.

9.  Use analytics to guide your email marketing strategy.

Always consider using analytics to make data-driven choices about your email marketing strategy. When you regularly assess data across your email marketing campaigns, you can conveniently adjust your blasts to enhance reader engagement.

However, your most essential metrics are as follows:

• Open Rate- the percentage of people who actually open their emails
• Click-Through Rate (CTR)- the portion of subscribers that click on a CTA button or link in an email once they’ve opened it
• Unsubscribe Rate- the measurable percentage of people who opt out of an email list once they’ve opened it

Once you have these vital numbers, compare them to industry benchmarks to see how your campaigns have performed. Through analytics, you can quickly assess which campaigns have performed the best over time and begin tailoring emails into a more significant marketing focus. And with others, you can also start making proper adjustments to give room for improvement. And overall, the key to using analytics to drive strategy is ensuring that your campaigns continue showing gradual improvement via increased open and click-through rates.

10.  Lastly, purge and clean out your email listings regularly.

Clutter isn’t suitable for anyone, especially regarding your email database. And though an extensive email database can appear valuable, it’s not about the list’s quantity but the quality. What matters most with email subscribers is the percentage of opened emails, click-throughs, and conversions, as these metrics clearly determine the amount of driven traffic to a website. In addition, a list of engaged subscribers holds more weight on your delivery rate by reducing spam and unsubscribes.

At least three or four times a year, you should review your list of subscribers and check those who haven’t engaged with your content in a while. See if the emails have bounced, are no longer valid, or are worth re-engaging with new content. In any case, check which recipients on your list should be removed and keep your database clean for campaign success.

We want to help you build an email marketing strategy that converts leads and improves your bottom line!

As a business owner, you may have limited time for maintaining email marketing best practices. Yet, with a solid and innovative strategy from BUILDINGBLOCKS, you can rest assured that your campaigns will work and yield genuine results.

Get started today by scheduling a FREE 30-Minute Consultation, or call 281-203-0529.

Check out this resource from BUILDINGBLOCKS!

Does Email Marketing Still Work?

^References

1. ^{Optimized mobile email photo concept by Charles Deluvio— Thank You!}