Even if you hate email and you despise every second you spend drowning under the weight of your inbox, you can’t deny the overwhelming power of a good marketing email. Something pulls you in, captures your attention, nearly forces you to click, and – BAM – hook, line, and sinker. You’re theirs.
As a business owner, sales professional, or marketer, knowing how to craft a decent marketing email is a talent not to be overlooked. Crafting these emails can seem easy at first, but that’s usually around the time when you feel like you’re wand-less and battling Lord Voldemort riding Smaug the dragon. So, in an effort to make the task of email marketing a tad less frightening, here are some must-read tips to help you out.
Your choice: a long email or death by fire?
What is it about long emails that sort of make you want to invent new cuss words and/or have an impromptu seizure? There’s just something about globs of text inside an inbox that is unnatural to the human brain. So, when you decide to craft your brilliant email marketing campaign with one paragraph too many, the only thing you’re really doing is forcing a premature mental breakdown on a handful of people.
In other words, your emails need to be short; they need to be concise, and they need to incorporate Very. Short. Sentences. This doesn’t mean you can’t have fun or be conversational (because you should really do that). It just means you shouldn’t go on and on and on and on and on…
The school of witchcraft and subject lines
Subject lines are tricky little suckers. They must be short, but then again, they must capture someone’s attention. That, in and of itself, is a ridiculous task that only the most masterful of Jedi copywriters can accomplish successfully. What makes this task even more absurd, though, is that subject lines also have to be true and informative. If you don’t speak to what’s actually inside the email and if you mislead the consumer at any point, you risk the chance of being marked as spam or receiving a beautifully wrapped “unsubscribe.”
When it comes down to it, if you’ve been hurting your head for hours trying to muster up a subject line, then you may want to rethink the content of the email itself. Ever heard the saying, “It’s like putting lipstick on a pig”? Well…
Hey there, good lookin’.
Plain text emails are so last year. If you want your marketing emails to be noticed, you gotta’ step up your game. We’re talkin’ images, colors, fonts, the whole shebang. You need a layout and a look that complements your content. Do this and people will be more likely to pick up what you’re puttin’ down.
The key here, however, is to make sure you don’t go overboard. Keep your emails easy to read, good to look at, and simple to follow. Your emails should also be consistent and tie into your brand nicely. For example, every time MailChimp sends out an email, you automatically know who it’s from without ever seeing their name. This is because they use the same fonts, colors, layout, and characters throughout their emails (hint, hint: brand guidelines), but they still manage to keep things interesting by playing with the content and imagery.
Got a dictionary handy?
Around 500 words ago, we talked about keeping your emails short. HOWEVER! Your emails can be super, duper short but still not make a lick of sense to anyone who happens to open one of them.
If you write an email that appears to be an excerpt out of a pre-law textbook, you may as well have never sent it. Not only will your readers not be readers, but they’ll hate you.
That is all.
Let’s CTA all over that CTA.
Right next to subject lines, your CTAs (call-to-actions) are going to be one of the most important elements of your emails. These typically aren’t as difficult to come up with as a subject line, and they can actually be kind of fun to create.
This being said, it’s important to think outside the box here. Explore options that don’t look like “Learn More” or “Register Today.” Instead, play with phrases like “Discover Why” or “Explore Options.” If you’re sending someone to a blog, then use pieces of the blog inside your CTA. For example, say your blog is about tips on productivity. Your CTA could say “Get Tips” or “Get Productive.” If you’re trying to register someone for an event, then you can switch things up a bit by using action-oriented, you-centric phrases such as “Claim My Spot” or “Save My Seat.”
Think you got this whole email marketing thing down? If so, go forth and email market like you’ve never email marketed before. If not, that’s cool, too. We’ve got plenty of more tips where these came from. Stay tuned for more tips or visit the Tridigital blog for more insight into the world of marketing.
