Email advertising is a really important part of content marketing and digital marketing in general. It’s a great way to communicate with both your customers and prospects. It also helps strengthen your relationship and build trust with both of these groups. As if that isn’t enough, according to HubSpot, 59% of marketers feel that email advertising is their biggest source of ROI. If you’re ready to start getting the most out of your email, continue reading to see our email advertising tips.
Types of Emails
There are different types of messages that you might send to your customers and prospects, and they all have the ability to provide a lot of value for you and your business. So before we discuss our email advertising tips, let’s take a look at each type of email.
Marketing Emails
When you think about communicating with your customers and prospects, marketing emails are probably the first thing that come to mind. These are the types of emails that include information or promotional messages. They’re also sent to customers and leads who specifically want to be updated about your business. Marketing emails include a variety of email content, but the most common are newsletters, sales promotions, announcements, press releases, follow-ups, and surveys. Just remember that the information included in these emails will depend on who you’re trying to reach, whether that’s prospects, customers, reporters, vendors, or affiliates.
Transactional Emails
These are emails that are triggered by customer activities, so they’re usually automated. Common transactional emails include welcome messages, order tracking, received payments, and registration confirmations. While these messages may seem simple, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of these messages. When someone is sent a transactional email, they’re much more likely to engage with you again. These emails also tend to have very high open rates, which gives you plenty of opportunities to get re-engagement and to cross-sell.
Operational Emails
Operational emails are just what they sound like. They pertain to the operation of your business such as holiday closures, maintenance plans, or changes to the availability of your service. While it might seem easy to skip these emails, being consistent with these messages will help maintain trust and engagement with your customers. In addition to this, they’re more than just informative. They can also be used to improve your business’s sales and image.
Just remember that whenever you send out an email, you should keep the goal in the mind and structure your message accordingly.
Email Advertising Tips
Now that you know what kinds of emails you’ll be sending, let’s talk about what you can do to make sure you get the most of them with these email advertising tips.
#1: Grow Your Subscriber List
No matter how big your subscriber list is, you should always work on growing it. You can never have too many subscribers!
One option to continue this is a signup feature on your website. You should give your website visitors the ability to sign up in multiple areas. This can include your homepage, blog page, and anywhere else it can be appropriately placed.
If your business has a presence at conferences or tradeshows, you can have a newsletter sign up. This way, even if you can’t close a deal with someone in person, you’ll still have the opportunity to continue your communication with them.
Social media can also be used to collect new email subscribers. Host a contest or giveaway that includes a link to a sign-up form that asks for an email address and includes email opt-in.
You can also set up your checkout process to include an email opt-in option. Customers can even be given the option to let you know what kind of messages they want to receive. This will ensure that any emails they do get will only be what’s important and valuable to them.
The most important thing is this: never purchase an email list. Not only do these lists provide low-quality leads, but because these people never signed up to get emails from you, they’ll most likely unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam.
Finally, keep in mind that while keeping your subscriber list growing is important, it’s just as important to maintain your current list as well. Remove any email addresses that are no longer valid or hard bounce every time you send out an email. This will help you be sure that you’re able to continue reaching the inboxes of subscribers truly interested in your updates.
#2: Encourage Reader Engagement
Email marketing has improved upon direct mail when it comes to engaging your leads and customers because it provides the opportunity for them to engage with you. Just sending out any email won’t get you the meaningful engagement you’re looking for, though.
In order to maximize engagement in your emails, keep the following email advertising tips in mind.
Don’t overlook subject lines. Use subject lines to speak to your audience directly and provide them with something that will stand out from other emails in their inbox. A great way to do this is with an automation service like HubSpot or Sharpspring, which will help you personalize your emails.
Develop a distinctive voice for your emails. Your emails should sound like they’re coming from a person. Without a distinct voice, your audience will feel like your emails are cold and impersonal. This will make them less likely to read your emails, let alone engage with them.
Segment your emails. We talk about this a lot, but that’s only because it’s so important. Segmenting your email lists by reader demographics will make it easier to create messages that will be most valuable to the reader. Sending messages that resonate with your audience’s needs will make them more likely to engage with your CTA and engage with your email or, better yet, share it with others.
Keep in mind that your goal in this is to get your audience to engage with your email. Doing this will also help build your relationship with your customers and leads, which is one of the most important goals of content marketing. Engagement is the key to getting the most out of your email advertising!
#3: Personalize Your Emails
Whenever possible, add a personalized element to your emails. Include the recipient’s name in the email, personalized subject lines, or personalized preview text. CRMs like HubSpot and SharpSpring will allow you to easily insert personalization into your emails.
You can also use segmentation to personalize your emails using rules that you set up based on the information you have about your contacts. In HubSpot, this is known as dynamic content and in SharpSpring this is known as smart mail. With smart mail and dynamic content, blocks of images or text within your email can be switched depending on the rules you’ve set up. This will allow you to create only one email that can be sent to multiple segments.
#4: Avoid Getting Marked as Spam
One of the most important email advertising tips to keep in mind is that you need to avoid having your emails marked as spam. If they’re marked as spam, this will be very detrimental to your ability to send emails at all. Targeting the right audience is considered the best way to do this. If you’re providing great value to your readers, they won’t mark your emails as spam and they’ll engage with them.
You should also make sure that you’re following regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act. This includes making sure that the recipients of your emails have given you permission to email them.
Also avoid using all caps, too many exclamation points, or exaggerated phrasing. This is usually associated with spam emails, so your email may end up getting caught in a spam filter.
Poorly formatted HTML can also get your emails stuck in spam filters, so make sure your HTML looks good before you send it out.
In addition to this, having memorable branding in your emails is important. The recipients of your emails should be able to remember that they gave permission to send them emails, and memorable branding plays a role in this. However, another way to make sure that your recipients remember you is to email them consistently. This will also keep communication open between you and your customers and leads.
#5: Send Emails That Look Good
The fifth of our email advertising tips is about the look of your emails. Sending emails that don’t look contemporary or well designed is a good way to ensure that they won’t get very good engagement, so don’t overlook the design of your email.
Use short paragraphs and make sure that the keywords or phrases relevant to your readers are clearly visible. You should also include bullet points when listing things and write in a way that makes it easy for readers to skim the content of your email while getting all the most important points.
You should also avoid relying too heavily on pictures because some email providers will block images or consider them a sign that the email is spam. A good rule to follow regarding email images is that they should illustrate what you’re trying to communicate without replacing or overpowering your content.
#6: Make Links & CTAs Interesting
Usually, email advertising has one of two goals: increasing traffic to a website or a landing page. If either of these is your goal, it’s crucial to provide links and CTAs that people will actually click on, otherwise, you’ll be sending pointless emails. The best way to do this is with visually appealing buttons and links that provide readers with more than one opportunity to engage.
Keep in mind that these are named calls to action. They should be written in a way to asks the reader to take an action. In fact, the more exciting the action is, the more alluring it’ll be to your audience. This will increase the likelihood that your readers will engage with your email.
Avoid generic CTAs like “learn more” or “shop now” and write CTAs that are more unique and specific to your business and audience. It’s even better if you can find a way to make your CTAs work well with your subject line and email copy.
#7: Make Unsubscribing Easy
Making it easy to unsubscribe may seem like the opposite of what you should be doing in order to continue communicating with your customers and prospects, but forcing people to stay on your email list by not giving them the option to unsubscribe will only lead them to mark your emails as spam. This will only make it harder for you to send emails in the future, so make sure you take the unsubscribe link into account when designing your email and make it as easy as possible.
#8: Keep Mobile in Mind
This goes hand in hand with making sure that your emails look good because mobile responsiveness is part of the design.
Remember that 66% of email opens occur on smartphones or tablets. If your email isn’t set up to look just as good on mobile as it does on desktop, recipients probably won’t even look at your email. You should also keep in mind that missing out on views from mobile devices will result in your advertising emails losing a huge number of clicks, so mobile optimization is key.
Keeping subject lines short will help your emails stand out on mobile devices because they don’t provide as much space for subject lines and desktops do. You can do this using numbers, symbols, or even emojis if they feel right for your business.
And once again, personalization will help you stand out on mobile as well, so make the most of it and get creative!
#9: Provide Value
One of the best email advertising tips we can provide you with is to remind you that the best email advertising provides its audience with something that matters to them. Part of its function should be to keep your business top of mind, but the ultimate goal should be to develop a relationship, which will lead to better engagement. This can be done by providing your email subscribers with educational information, operational messages, or even advertising messages.
Focus on what your audience wants to hear, not what you want to tell them because, at the end of the day, email advertising should be about your audience.
RESULTS ARE VITAL
With the help of these email advertising tips, you’ll be on your way to getting great results in no time! However, if you feel that you could use some help with email advertising, Vital Digital is here for you!
Vital Digital provides digital marketing services including, but not limited to, content marketing (including email marketing!), search engine optimization, and website development. We also provide HubSpot, SharpSpring, and Zapier consulting to help you automate your marketing and function as efficiently as possible. Request a free quote today and let us know how we can help!