Email Marketing Tips – Improve Your Game
Crafting a great email may feel like rocket science, but it’s not. Follow these ten email marketing tips and you will soon be creating emails that impress your customers, make your business look professional and increase your bottom line.
- Proofread your writing. Even though it’s an email, it still needs to be checked for spelling, proper grammar, punctuation and any other errors. Your writing represents your business. You want people to remember your amazing message, not your embarrassing spelling mistake.
- Make your subject line unique. You want your email’s title to be simple and interesting. It should also get your reader to open your email. So make sure you don’t repeat the same words from your email’s title over and over in your email. Your reader may be disappointed at the lack of unique content or think you don’t really have anything to say and stop reading.
- Give your email offers a time frame. People act when they know a deadline is looming and there is something they don’t want to miss out on. Make sure that you give an expiration date for your email offer to create a sense of urgency in your customer to act. However, don’t overemphasize the deadline. You don’t want your reader to associate anxiety with your company’s emails.
- Don’t yell at your reader. Think carefully about capitalizing entire words in your email. “All caps” is also associated with “yelling” and you don’t want your reader to feel like he or she is being yelled at. Make sure you use proper capitalization and lower case in your email’s subject line and body.
- Don’t spam your reader – and don’t say spam either. If your email headline announces “This email is not spam,” your audience may wonder why you felt the need to say that. Their email program might dump your email in the spam folder, too. You want to convey your message and get your customers to respond. Telling them your email isn’t spam won’t accomplish that goal and just wastes valuable space.
- Don’t feel the need to exaggerate. Your customer thinks you’re great, otherwise they wouldn’t sign up for your emails. Don’t overdo it by over-promising or telling them how great you are in your email. If you are offering a great product or service, a great deal or helpful information, the value is already there.
- If you don’t provide a “call to action,” you may lose out. You need to tell your customer what you want them to do, and give them an easy way to accomplish this. Whether you need them to click on a link or call a phone number, make sure you tell them clearly that this is the next step and provide the information they need to take that step.
- Keep numbers and excessive punctuation out of the subject line. You want your email’s headline to convey a message. If you need to share facts and figures, do it in the email’s body. If you want to include a contact number, don’t put it in the headline. Instead, place your phone number in the body of the email, preferably with an irresistible call to action.
- Be careful with images. Including images or logos in your emails can be a great visual. However, keep in mind that your customer’s email program may block or refuse to download the image. It’s a good idea to write a short caption explaining the picture. This way, your customer will be able to know what the image was meant to convey even if they can’t see it. This is especially helpful for an email newsletter that may contain several images.
- Write good copy. You want your message to grab your reader’s attention. Write short, active sentences. Include bullet lists of important information, since many people skim emails. If writing is not your strong suit, you can still craft good email marketing messages. And if you need help creating your effective email marketing campaign, call Fall River Internet at 508-415-8648 for a free consultation and evaluation of your email marketing strategy.
Fall River Internet has been helping businesses achieve their email marketing goals with everything from occasional advice on design, to full “white gloves” service. In our white gloves service, we handle the entire mailing (design, graphics, content writing etc.) and we handle the management aspects of your email marketing (maintaining of your email list(s), adding subscribers, removing subscribers, reporting statistics on mailings such as open rates, click through rates and much more). If you want to know more about our services, call us at 508-415-8648. Read more about our email marketing services here.