Email marketing is the cornerstone of digital marketing. It’s one of the first kinds of online marketing and, despite its age, grows stronger year after year. With the potential to improve your revenue and customer retention, it’s a skill every marketer needs to be great at.
Email Marketing Is A Long-Time Friend
Email marketing has existed nearly as long as public email addresses have. Through the years it’s become less of an irritation as anti-spam measures have improved, and marketers have learned to communicate better with people.
It’s also an asset, offering as much as a 12% increase in customer lifetime value over other forms of marketing. That means that customers obtained and retained by email marketing are going to pay more and stay longer.
You Have To Get Creative To Make Your Email Marketing Stand Out
Most digital marketers have been actively email-marketing for so long that their creativity becomes stifled. It’s easy to imagine why. After all, with many companies sending out multiple emails every day, creativity can get tapped out quickly.
Of course, the team at Visceral Concepts has your back. We’ve put together this handy list of creative tips for your next email marketing campaign. Put them into action and you’ll see better results.
Make It Personal
You’re going to hear this email marketing tip from everyone. “Add the recipient’s first name with an automated placeholder.” Yeah, that works well, but it isn’t what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the way you talk to them.
Write each email (or autoresponder) as if it were an email to a friend. Use casual language and write in the same way you would hold a conversation. There’s no need to be overly professional. Your email campaigns will allow you to build great connections just by being personal.
GIF Your Email Marketing A Pop
Animated images are great additions to an email marketing campaign. Used properly, they’ll catch your readers’ attention, capturing that short attention span and moving them through the email. After all, people are naturally drawn to pay attention to the movement.
Another great way to add GIFs to your email marketing campaign is by using them to highlight important parts of your email. Use them sparingly though, as they tend to slow download times due to downloads. Mobile devices will be especially prone to that.
Test Your Style
Any digital marketer worth his stuff is familiar with A/B testing. This is a great way to gather data about any of the campaigns you run, even email marketing campaigns. You ought to know that calls-to-action, subject lines, greetings, and the body text should be tested at every opportunity.
What you might not have considered is A/B testing the style of the images. Should you use something clean and crisp, or a little darker and grungy? Will your e-commerce customers respond better to pictures of the product by itself, or are shots of it in use better? Test to find out what styles work better in every email you can.
Add A Little Video Content
By now you realize that video is an important part of your content creation process. Did you know, however, that it could provide a valuable element to your email marketing campaigns?
Seriously! It turns out that, according to Adélie Studios, video can increase your open rates by nearly 20%. In some cases, your click-through rates can improve by upwards of 300%. That’s kind of a crazy sounding number, but if it’s half right, can you afford to ignore it?
Transform Your Transactional Emails
What’s a transactional email, you ask? You know those emails you get to confirm your account, or that let you know your order has shipped? That’s a transactional email, and most of them are as boring as can be.
If you want to boost your email marketing, you’re going to have to make those more fun. You see, they’re a crazy important part of the whole process, often setting the tone for your company. If you can avoid it, don’t let them be some stamped out standard email that came with your platform.
Call Back Cart Abandoners
Cart abandoners are one of the best opportunities that a great email marketing strategy can earn you. You see, these are people who were close to buying. That means they wanted your product, but something stood between them and the final purchase. If they never hear from you again, they may never come back.
Make sure you have a system in place that will follow up with them several hours, days, and weeks later. They need the little reminders that their product is still in a “cart” at your online store. Don’t be afraid to bother them either. They’ve already left your site. The only thing that can happen is that you remind them to come back.
Reveal Rave Reviews
The greatest form of marketing on the planet, word of mouth recommendations have always been and will always be the best way to get new customers. There’s a level of built-in trust that you can’t buy anywhere.
Inject a little bit of the strength of word-of-mouth into your email marketing by using a few testimonials and reviews. They’re a huge boost to those cart abandonment emails we just mentioned but can also help to build hype around your company when added to your subscription emails. As a bonus, add them into emails meant for anyone ready for a purchase and use them to nudge someone considering an upsell.
Group Your Contacts
If you’re collecting data about where your leads are coming from, you ought to be segmenting your lists. That’s the process of grouping them into “segments” that have related interests. The more data you can gather about your lead lists, the better you can segment them.
Segmenting allows you to alter your email marketing campaigns to better fit the people on the list. They also help you to target your campaigns at the audience that will be most receptive to them. Make sure you identify all the attributes you need to pay attention to, then use them to create segments that really let your email marketing shine.
Email Marketing Hinges On Interesting Emails
These tips we’ve offered are a great way to rekindle creativity when planning your next email marketing campaign. These, coupled with the basics of writing a great email, are sure to boost your future email marketing campaigns and allow you the growth you need.
