Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to market yourself online. With an average ROI of 122%, email marketing boosts brand awareness, customer loyalty, and sales. Make sure you're optimizing your emails so customers will take action every time you land in their inbox.
People get a lot of emails. The average office worker gets 121 emails a day. That means you're competing against 120 other messages every time you send an email, so building your list and engaging with that list is no easy feat. Use this as an opportunity to get more quick wins for your email marketing campaigns.
Quick win #1: Write compelling subject lines
The subject line is the first thing people will read. In fact, 68% of people open an email based on the subject line alone. So if you're writing a sub-par subject line, you're losing more than two-thirds of your potential email traffic.
Write better subject lines to get results. Be sure to:
- Be useful and specific
- Identify yourself
- Use words like Alert, News, or Bulletin
- Use words like Daily and Weekly
- Use words like New and Video
- Avoid repetitive subject lines
- Ask a question
- Use timely topics to create urgency
- Test your subject lines so you know what works best
Quick Win #2: Optimize body content
Your email copy needs to be attractive and compelling to keep people reading. The best way to keep your list engaged is to use the AIDA model.
AIDA is an acronym that stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.
- Attention: What can you say to hook your reader? A provocative question? A controversial statement? A shocking statistic?
- Interest: Once you've piqued your reader’s attention, keep their interest by communicating the benefits of your solution or product. How do you improve the customer's life? What do they get out of this?
- Desire: From there, build a desire in your customers to convert or buy. How will their life change for the better?
- Action: In the final step, your readers convert and become a customer by taking action.
While content matters most, you can add other features to your email copy to boost engagement even more, like:
- Short paragraphs.
- Bullet points.
- Personalization with the recipient's name and company
Quick Win #3: Optimize CTAs
The call to action is the most important part of your email. The CTA tells your email recipient what they should do next. Without a CTA, there's little point in sending an email.
Optimize your CTA by:
- Focusing on the most important action you want your audience to take
- Creating a CTA button
- Putting your CTA button at the beginning of the email. That way your audience doesn’t have to scroll to the bottom.
Quick Win #4: Optimize for mobile
53% of all emails are opened on a mobile phone. And though only 14% of all conversions happen on mobile, it's still an important part of the buyer's journey. Always optimize your emails for mobile users by:
- Increasing the size of links, fonts, and CTA buttons.
- Spacing links far enough away from each other.
- Reducing image sizes
- Keeping the email brief, with short paragraphs
The bottom line
Email marketing is an ROI-positive way to reach your audience. But, like most things in marketing, you'll only get results if you do it the right way. Follow these 4 guidelines to make a serious difference in your next email marketing campaign.
By the way, we've created an Introduction To Inbound Guide that will help you improve all aspects of your inbound campaigns. Overhaul your digital channels now.
