Five Key Elements That Email Marketers Forget To Add To Their Email Campaigns
Persuading a consumer to sign up for your email list is the easy part. The hard part is convincing them to actually open the emails.
Small businesses see an average of 21.53% open rates on their emails, concluded by Mailchimp. How can a small business owner marketing their products or services through email attempt to exceed this average?
By standing out.
Most marketers miss the five fundamental elements of a successful email campaign. By adding these five key elements to their email campaigns, they can increase their chance of campaign success.
Do your email campaigns have these five key elements?
- Catchy and noticeable subject lines with a correlating preview text. The success of a subject line and preview text comes down to knowing your audience. What can you say that intrigues them to open their email? For example, to motivate the Millennial generation to open an email you can use satire. Market research will show you that millennials relate strongly to satire pertaining to themselves. For example, let’s say your product is a planner app and your target audience is millennials. The app help millennials organize their day to day activities, work projects and social events. Your subject line would be, “Who let me adult? I can’t adult.” Your preview text would say, “Person: How are you? Me: I literally have no idea.” Once the consumer opens the email, the text they see is, “The app that will do your adulting for you.” Since the subject line and preview text spoke to the audience’s language, it had much more power than a subject line saying, “The best planner app for millennials!” and a preview text of, “Download it today!”. Know your audience and formulate copy that resonates with their current pain points.
- Follow a formula. Fast food chains around the world have figured out their formula and are smart enough to stick to it. A McDonald’s French fry in New York City is long and skinny. A McDonald’s French fry in Japan is long and skinny. A McDonald’s French fry in Mexico is long and skinny. Regardless of the country you are in, you expect your McDonald’s fry to be long and skinny. If you were to order fries and be presented with a fat and short steak fry, you would be confused. People go to McDonald’s because they know what fries they want to eat. People open your email campaign because they know what they want to read. Finding a formula for the pictures, type of text and layout of your email campaign is important in motivating consumers to open the email. If one day your email campaign is a long form article about the benefits of potatoes and the next day it’s a video of potatoes being harvested in Idaho and the next day it’s five recipes for the best potato side dishes, you may experience a sharp decrease in opens. People like routine, use it to your advantage.
- Figure out how to talk to your audience. Just as you created a subject line and preview text that spoke directly to your target audience, your content needs to do the same. Performing research to figure out how your audience talks, acts and is experiencing their life is crucial. For example, let’s say your product is a planner app for 30-40 year old CEO’s. Would the above text that we used to market to millennials work well? Probably not, as CEO’s aren’t going to feel as if they are struggling to adult and that they have no idea what is happening in their lives. Instead, your text will have to focus on the pain points of scheduling out the day to day activities of running a business. Talking to your audience, and not just trying to sell a product to them, is the most important part of any marketing campaign.
- Motivate them to come back for more. What’s the value point of each email you send? Better yet-if you were a consumer, would you want to open your emails? People don’t turn on the TV and fast forward through a show so they can watch only the commercials. If your email campaign is just a marketing pitch without any value, you can’t expect your consumers to be interested. How can you provide a value that makes your email campaign worthy of being opened? For example, a clothing company could send an email with their newest apparel additions. They motivate the consumer to open the email and get their free shipping discount code. Below the discount code, there is text that reads, “You like free shipping and we like making you look good. Be on the look out for your next free shipping discount code, coming soon.” This motivates the consumer to keep checking new emails for their next discount code.
- Create a marketing automation funnel to increase the success of your call to action. In marketing there is a term called highly convertible. It refers to a consumer who has shown a strong interest in a product or service. For example, a highly convertible consumer is somebody who signs up for a one month trial. These consumers are the ones that automated responses are created for. As part of a marketing automation funnel, the highly convertible consumer that signed up for the one month trial will be placed on a specific list to be retargeted. Let’s say that after three weeks, the consumer hasn’t signed up to continue using the product past the month long tutorial. The remarketing list will automatically send them an email reminding them to sign up for the product. If the consumer still doesn’t sign up after one month, they’ll be sent another email reminding them that their trial is over. These emails will be more than just asking the highly convertible consumer to sign up. They will have the subject lines and preview text that we talked about before, as well as be written to market to that target audience specifically.
It’s not email campaigns with the higher number of subscribers that get the best return of interest on their marketing efforts. It’s the campaigns that focus on their consumers and create email campaigns that connect with them.
This is what makes your business stand out from the crowd.
Not seeing the results you want from your current email campaign? Contact me here to see how you can improve your campaign and increase your marketing efforts.