Email Marketing
December 10, 2020
Despite being an old channel for connecting with current/prospective customers, email marketing is still a convenient way to connect and interact with current and prospective customers.
Many brands, however, struggle to achieve the necessary tone and messaging to prompt action due to ineffective emails.
In this article we provide a few tips and tools that will help engage your customers and entice them to take action.
According to Statista, 306.4 billion emails were sent and received every day of 2020. Campaign Monitor also created a resource mentioning:
“...experts generally agree that 121 business emails are sent and received each day. “
And in a recent Hubspot survey, they found that 91% of consumers use email. It would seem that the use of email as a viable marketing channel won’t be slowing down any time soon.
Any company that has been around for a few years likely has a large database of emails of their prospects and customers to send out newsletters, helping suggestions, and even offers.
“It’s a good idea to build connections with your customers. Share surveys with them and allow them to opt in to receive emails from your organization.” - Justin Naibity, CEO and Founder of Physicians Thrive.
They boast an extensive emails database of over 70,000 subscribers with whom the company shares a plethora of helpful information.
Like any skill, writing emails that get people’s attention let alone keeping them engaged takes practice. Especially when you are working alongside a larger team, you’ll need to incorporate these procedures to stay consistent in your brand messaging.
Here are some tips that will help you along the way.
When a company sends out an email to its customers, it has a goal in mind. Whether that goal is to provide a customer discount or have them fill out a survey. The key here is to make sure the customer knows why they are receiving the email and what is expected of them.
Things that can confuse your reader may include:
If an email does not fully convey the purpose it can, more often than not, go ignored; these are situations we need to aim to avoid during email campaigns. The way to do that is to be clear about what is expected from the receiver.
In short, make your CTA simple.
When sending out the emails, it's important to explain how the recipients stand to benefit by taking your desired action. If your goal is to get the leads to fill out a survey, explain how that helps them.
An example to consider would be as follows:
“We need you to fill this survey.” versus ”By filling out this survey we can better tailor our services to you!”
The second one is far more compelling and is the kind of message that you send to the customers. When you’re clear about the reasons it can help persuade the customer to take action which helps move them toward your marketing objectives.
One thing that you can do to improve the value of your emails is to include some statistics in them. When you reference specific stats, it shows you did your due diligence and dug deeper into your story. Consider including stats like:
By being more specific or adding testimonials in your emails you entice readers to click through to read the full article.
There are a good number of tools that can be used to help facilitate your email writing for marketing purposes. One of these tools is the Boomerang extension for Google Chrome. It is filled with features that undoubtedly help in the writing phase. Boomerang assists in the following ways:
Respondable is a feature in the app that helps analyze the likelihood of receiving a response based on your current email copy by using artificial intelligence. The A.I. is taught using trillions of emails as examples and uses a number of different metrics to measure how well your email is written. It is recommended that any small company utilize this software to write better emails.
Below you can see all the variables at the bottom right of the tool and what is considered when analyzing emails.
The right sidebar measures response rate. In this example, the writer can improve the likelihood of increasing the probability of getting a reply by:
Another tool which is great is the CoSchedule Email Subject Line Tester. It will help you write better subject lines so that your emails get better click through rates. It will also suggest what to change within the subject line to make it more compelling. See the example below.
The tool suggests you should aim for your score to get as high as possible. But personally, if I get over 60, I feel satisfied.
That’s not all though. The CoSchedule tool also suggests what changes to make in your headlines.
Related Resource: Apart from that, check this guide by the SIA Enterprises on how to improve your email open rate.
With more and more customers and leads being inundated by badly crafted emails, it’s critical for brands to spend time writing more persuasive emails.
While there are various ways to go about it, by using our 3 tips and leveraging tools like Boomerang, you can get instant feedback on changes you could be making to increase your open rates while also delighting recipients rather than annoying them.
As a result, they are far more likely to take the action you want them to take.
However, writing persuasive emails is more of a craft that needs to be improved with practice. While various tools can help, you still need to put in the effort and creativity.
If you can build up that habit, your emails will be on the path to increased persuasiveness, which will surely lead to increased sales and brand awareness in due time.
