The last blog in this series focused on building your email lists and now we’ll talk about how to optimise the content in your enewsletters to get the best engagement from your enewsletter campaigns.
Everything I ever read about email marketing exhorts the importance of testing. In marketing we always talk about audience and tailoring our communications and methods of communication to suit our audience. So, while I’ll share a number of tips with you here about how to generally structure the content of your email campaigns, it’s important to acknowledge that different tactics will work differently for different audiences.
For example, an email campaign to subscribers of a shoe shop enewsletter will differ markedly to an email campaign to subscribers of a computer software enewsletter. The shoe shop campaign might be very heavily image based, while the software company relies on the written content to sell benefits to a technical audience.
Try some of these suggestions out on your next campaign but always keep your audience in mind. Monitor your results and focus on making consistent improvements in your open rates, click through rates and shares. Test, test, test!
• Make your articles short and sweet. A few sentences to an absolute maximum of 2 paragraphs is preferable. Link to more detailed information on your website.
• Include an image with nearly all articles and reduce all image file sizes to screen resolutions. Images with people are better. Keep in mind that many email clients default to no images.
• Link, Link, Link! Link your headings and images and use in-text links within your articles. Make it easy for your customers to find out more.
• Include calls to action where relevant (e.g. Book Now, Visit our website for more information, Download a PDF guide here, etc)
• Stop selling for a moment. Offer your subscribers something of value other than purchasing your product or service. Entertain them, inform them and reward them. You’ll keep them coming back for more.
• Consider what extras this campaign can give subscribers (e.g. Discount coupons, links to something interesting, exclusive offers or information). Provide email exclusive offers to retain the interest and engagement of subscribers.
• Be unique. For example, everyone offers “50% off” or “Free Shipping,” so spice it up a bit! For example, “28% off for the next 28 hours.”
• See what works on your Facebook page for ideas that might catch people’s interest in emails.
These are just a few ideas to get you on the right track. We’d love to hear about any email marketing changes you’ve made and their impact on your campaign results.