A few years ago, marketers were decrying the death of email. Instead of fading away a la Myspace and mood rings, email remains one of the most productive means of generating leads and selling products online. According to a 2013 National DMA email report, 89% of marketers consider email important to their organizational goals. Rather than dying out, 56% of email markets plan to focus more on their email campaigns in 2013.
How do you make sure this focus pays off? By making sure you are maximizing conversions and clickthrough rates with every email you send. Managers of five-star restaurants spend hours combining the right ingredients for their recipes. Similarly, creating a five-star email marketing campaign involves more than laying out some content and crossing your fingers – emails with killer clickthrough rates have a special mix of the right content, a stellar layout, and the right underlying strategy.
In the rush to ship emails out the door, we know it can be difficult to design the perfect email layout every time – trust us, we send out more than 8 million emails a month! With that kind of volume, we have spent a lot of time learning how to test and improve our email marketing.
To help you learn from our experience, we put together this two part resource:
1. A Clear, Attention-Grabbing Email Subject Line.
The Radicati Group reported that 1.9 billion non-spam emails are sent everyday. To break through this noise, you must develop a compelling email subject line that inspires your audience to click on and read your email. Remember, if you don’t capture your target’s attention in the subject line, they are never going to see any of the other parts of your five-star email strategy.
2. Actual Person as the Sender.
The name you include in the “From” field of your email can have a huge impact on your overall open rates. HubSpot conducted a number of A/B tests on our own emails, and we have found that sending our emails from an actual person increases both the open and clickthrough rates for our email marketing efforts.
People feel a more personal connection to your email when they receive it from “Shannon Johnson” than they do from Company X, or worse, some version of “donotreply.com”. You can even consider.
3. Company Branding.
Make sure your email marketing templates echo your overall company brand. You want the people opening your email to recognize who you are, and remember why they clicked on your email.
While they don’t need to be identical, the design elements in your emails should echo your company style. A consistent brand image, language, and tone helps your audience relate to your content and expands your overall brand experience. Consistent brand style also conveys the professionalism and planning that goes into your email marketing efforts – or at the very least, it’s a great step toward faking it!
For More Information: MEGHAN LOCKWOOD
@MEGHANLLOCKWOOD