Email marketing may have gotten its start long before its text message and social media counterparts hit the scene, but its impact on the marketing world is still significant. A direct channel for marketers to connect with consumers, email marketing offers brands an invaluable communication method to serve the wants and needs of their customers.
This guide is meant to work as a clear, comprehensive tool for you as you navigate through the intricacies of email marketing. With a marketing strategy as tried and true as this one, there’s a lot to learn. And you’ll want to be here to learn all about how your brand can optimize both your email marketing content and email marketing conversions in today’s competitive world.
Here's what we'll cover:
How to optimize email marketing content
1. Writing email subject lines like a pro
2. Writing email copy your subscribers will love
How to optimize email marketing conversions
1. Leverage marketing psychology
2. Tackle the most common email marketing conversion issues
3. With email-subscriber acquisition, leverage tools
If there are any other topics you'd like to see in this guide, please don't hesitate to let us know.
How to optimize email marketing content
1. Writing email subject lines like a pro
Before your email subscribers take one look at the messaging inside of your email copy, they’ll be met with a subject line that will be the deciding factor in whether or not they choose to click on your marketing content.
If the first few words your subscribers see speak to their interests, it’s safe to assume that they’ll be intrigued and read further. If not, you run the risk of missing out on valuable impressions and potentially losing subscribers.
To make sure that doesn't happen, consider these five tips for creating engaging subject lines:
1. Leverage current trends
Take advantage of trending topics when coming up with the angle of your next email subject line. It'll help emphasize your relevance in the marketplace and your knowledge of consumers' interests.
2. Add urgency
Urgency is a staple psychology principle that can influence your target audience to interact with your content immediately upon seeing it. Highlighting limited-time offers on the inside of an email right in the subject line, or cultivating some fun marketing FOMO, are just a few examples of how you can create the type of urgency that turns subject lines into email opens.
3. Keep it short
There’s no doubt about it, consumers have short attention spans. Your subject-line content should reflect that in a way that's beneficial to email subscribers. Keep your marketing content short and sweet, and you’re sure to have a more engaged audience.
4. Personalize your content
Speak directly to your audience by making your content personal to them. Personalized email marketing that uses their name, interests and past interactions will help draw them in to your messages.
Writing email subject lines that’ll grasp the attention of your subscribers doesn’t have to be hard. Take a look at this blog post for more tips.
2. Writing email copy your subscribers will love
Now that you’ve gotten email subject lines down pact, it’s time for the fun stuff: email copy.
This is where you get to speak to your consumers and inform them about your upcoming initiatives, deals or any other campaign happenings that would be beneficial for your customer base to be aware of. It’s also a great way to see what consumers feel is click-worthy inside your email messages.
But this can only happen if you write email copy that your subscribers are attracted to. These tips can help you achieve that sort of messaging:
1. Know your subscribers
Your email copy is specifically designed to catch the attention of your subscribers so it’s important that you have a clear understanding of who they are and what they’re looking for from your brand. Writing anything outside of the realm of what’s beneficial to your subscribers will lower your credibility and lead your subscribers to find their products and services elsewhere.
2. Add value
When your customers decided to subscribe to your email list, they did so believing that the information you provide would be of importance to them. You don’t want to disappoint. In order to meet their expectations, you must add value to their lives with the type of content you put out.
3. Use urgency
Urgency isn’t just great for email subject lines — it can be used in your to copy drive immediate action in consumers as well. Tactics like scarcity, worthwhile incentives, and the fear of missing out (FOMO), can persuade consumers to pay attention to your email copy and drive up click-through rates.
4. Empower subscribers
Consumers don’t need to be micromanaged in order to be led in the right direction. You can offer your subscribers helpful information and answer questions when they have them without coming off as too salesy. They’ll appreciate the opportunity to have autonomy over their own choices and they’ll feel more ownership over their decision to return to your brand in the future.
These steps can help get you started in taking copy to the next level for your email subscribers. Learn more about how you can do that here.
Happy writing!
How to optimize email marketing conversions
An email marketing campaign is only as effective as the amount of people who gain something from it. In order to make sure your brand and its audience are truly getting the most out of this marketing tool, you must create content that increases your email marketing conversions. Here are a few ways to do this:
1. Leverage marketing psychology
One way you can increase any conversions you're trying to drive within your email marketing is by using psychology.
While this might sound intimidating, let us assure you that brain science isn’t just for psychologists. Psychology principles have a way of resonating strongly with consumers and it’s no surprise — speaking directly to consumers' innate behaviors is an incredibly organic method of marketing!
Here are four of our favorite psychology principles that work well with email marketing:
Social proof
Social proof is the idea that humans follow the influence of others, and when you’re trying to increase email marketing conversations, this is a great tool to have in your back pocket. Referrals and reviews are forms of social proof. Looking for one geared toward email marketing? Letting people know that the information inside your email is well-liked by other customers is also a great way to exercise this psychological principle.
Anticipation
You want subscribers to be excited about your marketing content, and building anticipation can help you achieve that goal. Teasing out upcoming content or letting subscribers know about a future surprise can help create anticipation and keep your subscribers interested in what’s to come.
Competition
Consumers like competition, and you can help feed that desire to win. Set up limited-time email campaigns with correlated prizes or countdown clocks to encourage consumers to race against time, or rewards that can only be claimed by email subscribers during a certain time period. Doing so will activate your subscribers’ innate need to come out on top, and it’ll keep your brand top of mind in a fun way.
Scarcity
Remember the last time you got excited to purchase an item that there weren't many of? You were experiencing scarcity. Feelings of scarcity can motivate action in humans, and they can be implemented in email campaigns to help brands meet their marketing goals. You can use scarcity in your email marketing through the use of limited-time campaigns or other time-sensitive offers.
The following link will teach you more on how to incorporate psychology into your email marketing campaigns.
2. Tackle the most common email conversion issues
Email marketing isn’t without its fair share of challenges. In fact, there are four common email marketing issues brands can find themselves running into quite often (spoiler alert: it’s low open rates, low click rates, high unsubscribe rates and high spam complaints).
Here are a few things to try as you attempt to tackle each:
1. Low open rates
Remember how we talked about the importance of staying up to date on the latest trends? That’ll come quite in handy when you need to meet your open rate goals. If you want subscribers to click on your emails, you have to offer information that is relevant to their interests. Make sure to continue keeping tabs on what is relevant to their interests, through social media engagement, virtual or in-person events and any other channels that connect you straight to your audience.
2. Low click rates
Provide subscribers with content and links that add value to their shopping experience; consumers are interested in having seamless encounters with brands that satisfy their needs. If you're curious how you can do that, or what exactly will bring them value, the best thing to do is ask.
3. High unsubscribe rates
Tackling high unsubscribe rates can be done by prioritizing engagement. Only include necessary information in emails, do your best to keep content engaging with the help of the tips mentioned earlier in this post (like relevancy and personalization), and allow customers to engage with campaigns as they please. Also be wary of how often you're sending emails, so that your brand emails are not simply becoming another source of consumer inundation.
4. High spam complaints
On top of creating engaging content, make sure your brand name is visible and your emails include relevant content. Consumers who are confused by marketing messages are more likely to ignore the email or report it as spam. By only sending messages to subscribers who have interacted with emails in recent months, you can also steer clear of consumers who don’t find the information attractive.
Again, these are just a few tips to get started. You can learn more about each, along with what you can do about them, here.
3. With email-subscriber acquisition conversions, leverage tools
There are a lot of layers to building a strong email subscriber list, and good written content is only half the battle. What’s the other half? Utilizing quality digital marketing tools.
We know there are tons of tools out there to choose from, and picking the right ones can be a bit overwhelming, so we’ve narrowed it down to four of our favorites:
Popups
Popups are a standard tool in the world of marketing. They can help you immediately connect with, and convert, website visitors. You’ll most often see popups as soon as you visit a site or right when you’re about to leave.
Landing pages
Landing pages often have a farther reach than the other marketing tools in this list. Potential email subscribers can find these pages through social media posts, SEO or any other promotions of them.
Slide boxes
Slide boxes are great tools for increasing email signups. These email opt-in forms can be configured so that they only show up for consumers who have spent a great amount of time with your website, increasing the chances you’ll gain a subscriber who is genuinely interested in your content.
Header bars
Header bars are placed at the top of your site and are among the most well-received by consumers, as they don’t take up a lot of space on the website. They don’t distract consumers from their initial intent, but still deliver your message to site visitors.
You can learn more about each of these tools here.
Email is a powerhouse in the world of marketing and for good reason. Your brand has a lot to gain from using this marketing channel wisely. Thankfully, you can always rely on this handy guide to lead you to email marketing success. You’re going to do great, and we’ll be rooting for you along the way.
