Email marketing is far from dead. You may keep hearing that email is going ‘out of fashion’ in favour of apps like WhatsApp and Messenger, but most people still use email, especially in business. A good email campaign can bring in significant improvements in sales volume.
These are the main elements of successful email marketing:
Focus
- What is the end goal?
- What is the time frame or end date for the campaign?
- Who are the recipients?
- What are their current pain points?
- How does your offer solve their problems?
Campaign structure
- Work backwards from the end date, typically the frequency increases towards the end of the campaign.
For example: The last 5 days for a special offer you would send emails on day 5, 4, 2 and 1.
A longer term campaign can have emails spaced out as far as 2 weeks apart at the beginning.
- Plan the email content before you start writing.
Email structure
- The subject line must make people want to open it to find out more
Names in the subject line don’t work like they used to – don’t do it!
- The opening paragraph should address a ‘pain’ for the reader.
- Short bullet point lists draw the reader’s eye – 3-5 is enough. A long list has the opposite effect.
- If you’re smart you can pick out essential sentences in bold and the reader will get the essence of the message by just reading the bold text.
- Ask for action at the end – then stop.
- Buttons are great to encourage people to do something.
- Postscripts (P.S.) are good to either give an additional push or to offer a lower cost offer as a fallback. However, the fewer calls to action the better, don’t confuse and distract with asking people to do too many different things.
Check your open and click rates and test different subject lines to improve these.
