Despite social networks like Facebook and Twitter, email marketing is usually the centerpiece of encouraging action from new and current customers for many small businesses. The Radicati Group estimates that each business person receives an average of 122 emails each day, a rate that is expected to grow to 126 by 2019. What does this mean? Your emails must be top-notch in order to stand out. We’ve harnessed the power of email marketing for over a decade and have learned that a well crafted email campaign improves the bottom line dramatically.
Marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. – Gigaom Research
Craft the perfect subject
This “headline” should capture the very essence of your sale, message or content. Try to entice your readers without overreaching and without sounding like a robot. Companies send emails for marketing, service, sales and communication and every email should include power words in the subject to entice opening. Spend the extra time ensuring subjects are also friendly and easy to understand.
You have just 3-4 seconds to grab your readers’ attention and interest them enough to open and read your email. (Litmus)
Add a greeting
Christopher Ruvo with Advantage magazine recommends starting every email with a proper greeting. Basically, when you meet someone, you would say “hello” so email etiquette demands the same principal. This also sets a polite tone easing the receiver’s initial thought of deleting your email and not reading further.
Don’t get wordy
After that nice greeting you’ve carefully drafted, the rest of your message should be straightforward and in KISS format (keep it simple stupid!). The digital mail experts at one of our favorite business tools, Mailchimp, recommends writing easy to scan emails since readers have an immensely short attention span.
Mind your manners
Using friendly words such “please” and “thank you” are essential tactics and avoid an abrupt or rude tone. Also, complete sentences are preferred over short incomplete phrases.
Proofread
Avoid spelling mistakes and grammatical errors to maintain professionalism. Use spellchecks and read through everything to ensure its accuracy. Utilize test features available on almost all email marketing platforms. One tool to consider is Grammarly – an online tool and writing platform that performs over 250 different proofreading and plagiarism checks.
Respond quickly
Fair or not, customers expect a fast response. In situations you cannot personally respond to clients, be sure to setup a confirmation email so customers are fully aware their message was received. Consider providing at least a time range that customers can expect to hear from you. This will greatly help ease any anxiety.
Have a plan
Smart email campaigns are well planned and strategically implemented. Defining your audience, determining goals drafting a schedule, avoiding common email mistakes, measuring performance, evaluating bounce rates, monitoring bounces, and running A/B tests can seriously improve your end results and gross sales.
Understand your goal
Emails are useful for boosting sales, building an audience, strengthen relationships, increasing website traffic, generating leads and building brand awareness. What is your goal?
Include a call-to-action
This is important. Your prospect needs to fully understand what action you want them to take. Constant Contact writer, Jeremy Taylor, recommends making buttons or hyperlinks stand out, and placing the main call to action near the top.
Including a call to action button instead of a text link can increase conversion rates by as much as 28%. – Campaign Monitor
Offer a reward
Business writing coach, Henneke Duistermaat, recommends offering your audience some sort of reward for reading an email such as a limited offer, coupon code or useful tip.
Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social. – Monetate
Personalize it
Try personalizing your email templates. According to Campaign Monitor, personalized subjects are opened 26% more often than unpersonalized subjects and click rates improve an astounding 14%. Most email clients offer easy code snippets that can be added to emails for personalizing. Again, it all comes down to being friendly. When you shake someone’s hand, you don’t say “Nice to meet you human.” That would be weird right? Instead, you would say “Nice to meet you Bob.”
Personalized promotional mailings have 29% higher unique open rates and 41% higher unique click rates than non-personalized mailings. (Experian)
Bonus for Shopify users
Be sure to check out one of our favorite Shopify apps, Receiptful, a Shopify app that allows you to “power up” your confirmation emails plus create a wide variety of automated follow up emails.
Using marketing automation can increase conversion rates by over 50%. (Aberdeen Group)
Bonus
We also recommend reading this Campaign Monitor article that lists 70 email marketing statistics you should be aware of.
