How to Run An Effective E-mail Marketing Campaign

How to Run An Effective E-mail Marketing Campaign

It’s tough to hit the right note with your marketing emails and ensure you don’t end up in the junk folder. You don’t want to sound too sales-pitchy. Social Spice Media is here to help. We’re going to break down the important elements of an effective e-mail and what you should test before you send it off to your customers.

Grab their attention. E-mail is easily accessible through our phones and other mobile devices, which means it can be difficult to sift through an overflowing inbox. For those of us who aren’t “Inbox Zero” neat-freaks, we spend a lot of time scanning through hundreds of e-mails and not open any of them if it’s clear they’re not immediately important. The most essential thing you can do as a business is get them interested and grab their attention before they open the e-mail. Use a short, catchy subject that entices recipients to open the e-mail, and pay special attention to the first line of the preview copy that they’ll see from their inbox folder.

What’s the goal? We’re certain your not sending out e-mails for fun, especially because they can take some time to put together. If you’re just sending them out because you think you have to, you might want to reevaluate your goals. Think about the importance of sending e-mails out to your clients or customers. What’s the purpose? (We promise, there is one!) Do you want them to subscribe or opt in to receiving future e-mails? Do you want them to buy something? Contact you? The goal is usually some form of action and if you want them to do something, then you’ll need to focus on how you can get them to do that thing…starting with opening the e-mail!

Broken doesn’t sell well…or at all. “You break it, you buy it” doesn’t work in e-mail campaigns. We’re talking about images and links, of course. Not many people want to buy your product or do business with you if your images don’t appear and your links don’t work. How could they, when they’re looking at an unappealing e-mail that can’t navigate them to proper pages? Images can easily be blocked in most e-mail browsers for security reasons. You may think there’s nothing you can do at this point, but there’s a way to work around this. You can create alternative text for the images, which is a useful way to make your e-mail still functional. Just make sure to test it out before launching so you don’t send out a draft full of errors.

Proofread. Some companies use templates when creating e-mails, which is beneficial and helpful when designing an effective e-mail, but you need to proofread and double check everything before you hit send. You don’t want “INSERT TEXT HERE” to appear in your e-mail and allow it to reflect poorly on your company or make it seem as if you don’t know what you’re doing. BONUS TIP: if you do make a mistake, try sending out an e-mail with some humor about the situation. Poke a little fun at yourselves and give the customer credit for being smart enough to notice the error.

Dynamic does the job. When you’re taking one final look at the content, make sure it’s dynamic and captures their attention from beginning to end. Avoid providing big blocks of text and little to no images because visual content tends to demonstrate more success. Also make sure the format isn’t ordinary or dull. The content is essential, but so is the layout. Another bonus tip: an image followed by a full blog is probably not the most effective way to send an e-mail.

The truth is: there’s no one right answer for how to send an effective e-mail. It can vary from business to business and sometimes you may have to test out different elements until you get a desired result.

Do you need help with e-mail marketing campaigns? Social Spice Media thinks it’s an essential ingredient to have in your digital marketing plan. Get in touch with us today so we can begin brainstorming and start sending out e-mails to enhance your company’s image.