4 Goals Every Marketing Email Should Strive to Achieve
Every email you send should have a purpose.
Never send email just to check it off your to-do list.
When done right, email marketing can be more than 40% more effective than social media.
So how do you go about creating an email that makes an impact?
First you need to understand the four goals of every email. It’s important to understand that without each of these steps working in tandem, you’ll never get them to the end goal.
Think of it as a sequence of four triggers to move your viewer to the next stage. Goal 1: Arrive in the inbox
Seems simple enough, but deliverability is a huge issue for company’s large and small. I’m working on another article about How to Increase Email Deliverability – I’ll link it here as soon as it’s published. Here’s a quick overview:
Clean your list Remove unsubscribes, bounces, and clean out old emails that haven’t opened.
We are bombarded with email daily. The average office worker receives 121 emails and sends around 40 per day. You have three ways to affect the open rate:
From name You can test many different from names including: Different first and last name combos, First @ Company Name, Company Name, Blog or Product Name.
Subject line I love using this headline preferences survey to help me develop subject lines. My top tips: keep it short, use the word “you” in the first 3 words if possible, and don’t give away all the info, give them a reason to open.
Teaser line Over 50% of email is now viewed on mobile devices. So the teaser line is becoming more and more important. Make sure that your subject line and teaser line work together to get the viewer to want to open the email.
Goal 3: Read the email
The average human attention span has dropped to just 8 seconds. In comparison, the goldfish beats us at 9 seconds. With email, it’s even worse. You have 2.7 seconds to grab your reader’s attention
Make sure your email is:
Relevant This is where segmentation is important. You don’t want to send an email about baby blankets to a teenager heading off to college or a $10,000 watch to someone who makes under $50,000 a year. It’s important to fully understand your customers’ demographics and firmographics and provide relevant content.
Eye-catching Have fun with emails. Add pictures and animated gifs. Use bright colors and bring your audience into an experience.
Engaging Treat them to something interesting. Pull them into a story and make them feel emotion.
Focused Keep it focused on one topic so that they can quickly make a decision.
Goal 4: Take Action
This is the reason you sent the email. You wanted your viewer to do something. Sign up for a free trial, download an ebook, register for a webinar, purchase a product.
It’s important that your call to action (CTA) is:
Clear The viewer shouldn’t have to guess what’s going to happen after they click. Make it clear what’s next. And avoid using ‘Click Here’ or ‘Submit’ any time you create a CTA.
Appropriate Asking for someone to buy now when they don’t know the details can feel like a big commitment. So make sure your CTA is letting them know that they are just going to the next step. Ask them out for coffee before the marriage proposal.
Focused Don’t give your viewer too many options. They should have one clear CTA so that they don’t have to make a decision.
Large As I mentioned before, over 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices. The average finger is 44px so design your CTA button or text to be large and easily clickable.
