Email marketing has long been a way for brands to drive conversions, maintain communications with customers, and introduce new launches, offers, and events. One of the big advantages is the ability to contact engaged recipients who have previously made a purchase, opted into newsletters or expressed an interest in your products or services.
However, anyone who has an email address will also know they are flooded with promotions at this point in the year when brands are keen to focus on conversions during the post-festive slump.
If you’re keen to stand out from the crowd, generate above-average campaign returns, or ensure your subscribers are fully connected with your plans for the year ahead, our seven creative tips will boost the success of your marketing—whether you’re sending your first-ever emails or need a tried-and-tested template you can rely on.
Designing Email Campaigns With Consistency and Concision
Tip one isn’t so much a recommendation as a fundamental to developing email campaigns that really resonate, respecting that your audience probably has minimal time and might decide whether or not an email is worth even opening within a fraction of a second.
Great email campaigns aren’t just designed to look great and incentivise viewers to open, read more, discover the exciting news or offers inside, and—essentially—react accordingly.
Amazing branding is also instantly recognisable, and even if you’re at the start of your journey as a business, you want to avoid clutter, rambling paragraphs of text nobody will read, or overwhelming your audience with too much, too fast and too soon (hint: save it for your landing pages).
A simple, well-thought-out email that viewers recognise and can scan quickly is ideal, with plenty of white space to ensure the interaction doesn’t feel chaotic and too demanding of their attention.
Creating One-Line Email Marketing Subjects and Headers to Enhance Open Rates
Next, you’ll want to consider how you title your email; and the obvious answer is rarely right.
Take a quick browse of your inbox, and you’ll likely see dozens of generic ‘Happy New Year’ messages—from companies you barely know—and tons of ‘massive discount’ subject lines that feel samey at best.
Think about your email subject as an appetiser, an incentive, an introduction and a way to give your audience a reason to care rather than simply a boring or predictable sentence that unveils what’s inside.
Keep it short, snappy, and contextual, and don’t forget to add a little personality. A funny, silly, or downright unusual email will be opened countless times more than one that promises little in the way of newness – it’s always good to use intrigue and human curiosity to your advantage.
Placing Equal Importance on Email Graphics and Creativity as Content
Emails are largely text, and it’s pretty hard to embed a video, GIF or large graphic without it taking far too long to load, putting your customers off, or detracting from the point you want to make.
The trick is to think about using carefully selected visual elements to add interest and entertainment to the text within your content, ensuring that you’re not relying on your viewers to do more reading than necessary to take away the messaging you need them to absorb.
Using colours, images, and fonts can capture psychological responses to cute, fun, and user-friendly graphics, which can establish a point or communicate an idea faster than written words.
Making it Personal, Contextual and Highly Relevant
Customisation is king, and consumers who feel seen, valued and part of a community are substantially more likely to engage with a brand, click on offers, react to a promotion or convert from interested viewers to loyal buyers if they feel you have made an effort to customise your communications just for them.
Whether this means inserting user names, cross-referencing past behaviours and purchases, or segmenting your email list to ensure your campaigns are structured slightly differently according to the demographics or preferences expressed by each group, it can have a marked impact.
If you’re fortunate enough to have a subscriber list, say 100,000 strong, it’s incredibly likely that you can split that database into several groups and provide more bespoke messaging to each segment based on all the information you know about their interests, priorities and pain points.
Adapting Email Marketing Campaigns for a Seamless Mobile-Based Experience
Needless to say, a proportion of your subscribers are almost certain to view emails on a phone or tablet, and gone are the lazy days when one format would work for everyone.
Instead, brands need to assume that each recipient could open an email on a phone and press delete or send an email to junk in a flash if the content is blurry, wonky, misaligned or impossible to read.
Optimising for mobile doesn’t have to be laborious or complex. It simply means paying the right amount of attention to layout and formatting, using big, impossible-to-ignore buttons, and avoiding long-winded content, which, as we’ve seen, is typically less effective.
Steering Clear of a One-and-Done Mentality
We often use A/B testing, and it’s much more than seeing which version works best or a tiebreaker between two designs or styles you like equally. It’s more like trying to adapt one message or campaign to satisfy as many of your subscribers as possible and avoiding the temptation to make important marketing decisions based on your own preferences or assumptions.
Getting to know what your audience loves and reacts to means you can pick a version that you know will generate more conversions and clicks without guesswork or hoping your audience will think and react the same way you do.
Our advice is also to ensure analytics and performance monitoring are embedded in your marketing activities rather than sending a campaign into the world and crossing your fingers. Analytics show you who has opened each message, who clicked on which CTA, and which fell flat.
Making tweaks and edits as you go is part of successful marketing, and the adjustments you make along the way are informed purely by your audience’s wants, needs, and responses.
Designing Call to Action Buttons as a Starring Feature
Finally, if you’re depending on your email campaigns to deliver, you need to check that your CTAs aren’t buried, difficult to find, or ambiguous. These clever buttons don’t just encourage reactions but also show your viewers exactly what you want them to do and how to do it.
A compelling, clickable, and highly visible CTA provides a steer for your viewer. The more they jump out of the page (or the screen), the easier it is for a subscriber to click and feel that whatever response you’re trying to gain is an obvious response.
We hope these tips and tricks provide a cheat sheet for immersive email campaigns that exceed your expectations. As always, if you’re stuck for inspiration, floundering at the first hurdle, or unclear on where to start, you are welcome to contact the content and digital marketing specialists at Woya for more tailored guidance, advice, and assistance.