It is a common misconception that the email marketing is not as that effective anymore, however, studies have revealed that the email marketing is still one of the best digital marketing tool which could return up to $40 against each $1 spent. The problem is that this misconception is widespread, and the reason behind it is that most of the businesses doesn’t know how to create an effective email marketing campaigns and how to fully leverage a modern email marketing system and automation, which lead to their disbelief in email marketing. There is nothing wrong with the email marketing it is still the most effective and impactful digital marketing and communication tool, the problem is that most of the businesses are unable to leverage it at its full potential. The emails are not only used for digital marketing, but an effective email marketing campaign can be used for brand awareness, customer relationship building and nurturing leads to convert them in to sales. This makes email marketing one of the most powerful marketing and communication medium and Building a Successful Email Marketing Funnel with Email Marketing System was never easier before. The email marketing campaigns are usually used for pushing personalized content, boosting customer engagements, improving communication, generating traffic for your website, collecting customer feedbacks, generating and nurturing leads and much more. In this blog we will discuss how a business can create an effective and successful email marketing campaign to achieve their objectives.
What is the different between email marketing and email communication?
There is a striking difference between email marketing and email communication. Both have different goals and objectives and technically both are part of a modern day digital marketing campaign. The email marketing in simple words is a marketing strategy where the emails are used as the primary medium to promote products/services and share your brand’s value to existing customers and prospects. The prime objective of email marketing campaign is to boost sales, improve lead generation and lead conversion and engage existing customers. Whereas the email communication is simply sending emails, reminders, acknowledgments, announcements, etc. to the existing customers. Now a day’s the difference between email communication and email marketing is shrinking, especially when your target is customer engagement but one distinguishing difference between email marketing and email communication is that the email marketing campaign is usually sent to mass audience which includes both customers and non-customers, but the email communication is usually only for existing customers and the email communication could be for individual customers as well as a group of customers or it could be aimed for the entire customer data.
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How to Design an Effective Email Marketing Campaign?
Before we discuss different aspects of email marketing campaign it is important to consider and understand how these emails are perceived by your audience. According to a research article published in The Telegraph, humans have shorter attention span than a goldfish!, the research was conducted by experts from Microsoft and the reason behind this phenomenon is the intensive use of smartphone. Now a day’s the human attention span is roughly about 8 seconds which was about 12 seconds in the year 2000, whereas a goldfish have an attention span of almost 9 seconds. This phenomenon is crucial to understand as your email will get only somewhere from 5 to 8 seconds of attention and during that short span of time your email should incite the interest of the user to compel them to read it further and if you succeed in attraction readers, they might convert too.
Here are important things to consider while preparing your email marketing campaigns:
Effective Email Marketing Campaign: From Name
What is the first thing you notice when you receive an email? The sender name or from name. That is the very first thing everyone notice when they receive an email. Hence the ‘from name’ is the most important element to work at while preparing your email campaign. And that is the reason why in many desktop and mobile email clients display the sender’s name in larger, bolder and more prominent text than anything else. Therefore a majority of your audience’s decision of opening the email will solely base on the ‘from name’ or ‘sender name’. For any successful email marketing campaign it is crucial to optimize this factor and the best way to do it is by using a familiar ‘from name’ or sender name. Think from the reader’s prospective, would you rather open an email from an unknown sender or from a businesses or person you know or at least heard of. Obviously people will prefer to open an email from a familiar sender therefore it is important to use a familiar sender name or simply put your business name in the ‘from name’, the goal here is to make is as much familiar to your audience as possible.
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Effective Email Marketing Campaign: Subject Line
After the sender name the second most important thing is the subject line or simply the ‘subject’ of your email. Poorly written subject lines are mostly ignored and people doesn’t open such emails. Most of the email clients and devices also highlight email subject with a bolder, larger and darker text. Almost everyone notices it. Both the sender name or ‘from name’ and the email subject line can have huge effect on your emails’ open rate. If these two factors are not properly optimized your most of the emails will go unopened. The first and most important thing to consider while optimizing the email subject is that it should be short and it should also convey value, or highlight the benefit user can get which will compel the reader to open up the email and see how this can be beneficial for them. The second thing to consider is the length of the subject line, although the advisable length is 30 characters, however, it can also be longer than that. According to many experts the email subject line’s length doesn’t have much impact, but in most of the devices and platforms only first 30 characters would be visible, so your message should be conveyed in first 30 characters. These tips will help you optimize your subject line which can greatly increase the open rate.
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Effective Email Marketing Campaign: Preheader Text
The preheader text is the short summary which followed by the subject line. This short summary or preheader text is placed just underneath the subject line in the inbox, therefore it can also have significant influence in compelling the readers to open the email. Optimizing the preheader text can greatly improve the email open rate. It the preheader text is not properly optimized, doesn’t convey any message or is incoherent from the subject or sender name, the chances are more than 70% of your audience will never going to open your emails. There are three major elements, the from name, subject line and then the preheader text, all three should be synchronized completely and should be able to convey a message which is appealing enough to compel your reader to open your email campaign. The preheader text, subject line and the ‘from name’ will help you boost your open rate, which is the first step towards success of your email marketing campaign. Another most important thing to consider is that your email content and all these three factors should be properly customized for the targeted audience, the generic subject and preheader text doesn’t compel most of the audience which is one of the main cause of the failure.
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Effective Email Marketing Campaign: Email Body or Body Content
As you have completely understood how to drive email opens using the sender name, subject line and an appealing preheader text, it is time to optimize the click through rate and generate the real value from your email campaign. Once a reader opened your email now it is all about the body content, if that is content succeed to deliver the right message, you are most likely to achieve your campaign goals. There is not set of rules or a successful template which can offer you a magical body copy. The best way to prepare your email body content is to make it short, simple, easy-to-understand and convey the genuine benefits of what your product/service or solution can bring to your customers. Do not brag about your features, make it short and to the point, don’t fill your email body with paragraphs upon paragraphs and images or links, just keep it simple, short and clean. Just remember two things while writing your email copy:
- What your product or service does?
- What benefits reader can get if they acquire your solutions?
You can also highlight what problems your product or service can solve but it is extremely important to keep your email copy shot and to the point.
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Here are some important elements that you can use in your email body copy to make it more appealing and effective:
- Instruction: Include a relevant article or blog-post which describes more about your product or service and how to use it.
- Engagement: The email body copy must be engaging and interesting, it shouldn’t use any technical or legal language, instead it should use simple and easy to understand language.
- Targeted Content: You should segment your email data into most relevant targeted groups and then direct your communication to align it with their interests.
- Nurture Relationship: A successful email marketing campaign requires to slowly build and nurture relationships with your prospects which will eventually help you convert them to customers.
- Simple Design: Keep your design simple with a combination of both plain text and HTML, it will also help you to pass from most of the email filters or security systems.
- Offer Service: It is important to focus on what you can offer instead of focusing on what you want your reader to do to make them convert.
- Add Links: It is important to include useful links for blogs, articles, portfolio or knowledge base but do not overdo it. Use fewer links possible as it will distract your readers.
- Contact Details: It is extremely important to put your address, contact number and even emails in your email, as it not only help reader to connect with your business but also build trust.
It is important that your email campaign is planned in upfront, all your messages should be planned to take the reader from the sales funnel and eventually convert them into loyal customers. A well-thought email copy or body content can boost your chances of success by up to 60%.
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Effective Email Marketing Campaign: CTA Button
The CTA Button (call-to-action) plays a crucial role in success of an email marketing campaign. It is an extremely important and influential element of your email. The message you put on it the color scheme you use for it and even the text style and size also matters and have tangible effect on your click through rate (CTR) and conversion rate. Most of the time businesses done CTA buttons wrong and undermine the overall performance of their email campaign. However, setting up your CTA button is a very simple thing, the key here is to make it relevant and clarify what it will do for the reader. For example, you can label it as “book a free appointment/demo for [product name]”. The key here is that your CTA button should be aligned with the rest of the email and it should enforce the same message/benefit you are emphasizing on throughout your entire email. This will not only increase the click through rate but it will also eliminate any perceived obstacles that the reader might have in their minds. It is also important to avoid commonly used friction words. A friction word perceived as an action which most of the time reader doesn’t want to do, for example, download brochure, apply now, order now or submit, etc. These words doesn’t clarify the action in adequate details and could be misleading. A well-crafted CTA button can greatly increase the chances of success of your email marketing campaign.
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How to Avoid Email Filters and Improve Deliverability?
If you follow all of the above steps, invest both time and efforts and create an excellent email marketing campaign, but at the end your emails are filtered-out by spam filters and security systems, your all hard work will be wasted. With every passing day the security and safety concerns are rising, this is compelling security solution providers to tighten their policies and develop systems which effectively prevent spammers to reach out to a common email user. Where this is great from the reader’s prospective it could become problematic for a common marketer who is not much familiar with these complex and sophisticated security systems. According to Wikipedia, almost 180 billion spams are sent every day, yes, you read it right it is ‘billion’, 180 billion. However, if you are sending a genuine message it is very simple to avoid these spam filters.
- Avoid using “buy” or “free” too many times in your email copy
- Request your readers to whitelist you or add you to their contacts
- Customize your communication for the targeted audience groups
- Use a real reply-to and sender email addresses (use business domain)
- Avoid infusing too much HTML code in your emails
- Keep your email’s size as small as possible
- Do not include too many links in your email
- Use organically-generated contact lists
- Avoid using purchased or rented email databases
- Chose a good and well-reputed email hosting/email server provider
It is important that you make sure your emails doesn’t caught up in spam filters and are designed exclusively for the targeted audience. Because if you are doing a mass email shootout then your email would be unwanted for most of your audience, and most of these users are likely to mark you as spam which will eventually blacklist you among connected networks and prevent your emails from reaching to even to your targeted audience as well. Furthermore, using your business domain email address for your email marketing campaigns not only increase deliverability but it also help building trust and give your audience confidence to open your message.
Conclusion
The email marketing campaigns are still one of the most cost-effective digital marketing tool with a potential of generating $40 at every $1 spent on email marketing. However, most of the businesses are failed to leverage it. There are several reasons of failure of an email marketing campaigns, such as, your emails are failing to pass spam filter, even if they land in the inbox it is not appealing enough to compel a user to click on it and open it. Let say if your subject line and preheader text is optimized even then if your email copy is not engaging enough or failed to present the value proposition, your campaign will fail. Therefore if you are creating an email marketing campaign you should properly optimize each and every element from sender name, subject line and preheader text to the email server you are using and everything in between should be up-to-the mark if you want to achieve your goals. In this email we have briefly discussed all crucial elements of an email marketing campaign. If you follow the above listed steps and tips you can easily create an effective email marketing campaign which can greatly help you achieve your business goals. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want us to help with your email marketing campaigns, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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