You have gathered a following of email subscribers that love your content and topics on your website or blog. You have set up a system to keep track of your email subscriptions and are ready to write your first email. Below are a few tips from Six Revisions about how to write a captivating email and how to keep your audience interested to keep them reading. The author Dave Sparks recommends to follow the best practices but also to customize your emails based on your particular audience. With this in mind, below are the main techniques author suggests to maintain an effective email campaign.
Before any email can make it into an inbox, you must make sure you are following the guidelines set up under the CAN-SPAM Act. Sparks references some of the main rules from the CAN-SPAM Act that are worthy noting:
- You cannot use misleading headings or subject lines that do not pertain to your content
- You must identify the message as an advertisement
- Provide contact information
- Provide an opt-out or unsubscribe method
- Follow up on opt-out requests within 10 days
To make sure your email is not filtered as spam, you can utilize the spam checker features in your email management system (MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, etc.) for testing purposes.
Once your users have received your email in their inbox, you must catch their attention so they will read your email over all the others they have inundating their inbox. Place important and eye-catching information ‘above-the-fold,’ or in the preview section of what the user sees in their inbox. Great information to place above the fold includes your brand, bold headlines, and content that wants to make the user open the email and read more. When considering design and information hierarchy, remember to check a text-only version of the email so that if users have images turned off they can still read the content and alt attributes. A text version is also important for mobile users. People are increasingly reading their emails and other communications on their mobile devices with a text-based email client, so it is important to test a text-only version. You should also provide a link to a web alternative at the top of the email so that if one of your users has trouble reading it in their email client, they can easily link to the web version.
When designing an email campaign, it is essential to maintain your brand from your website to your email to you business cards. Identifying with your brand your subscribers will know whom the email is from and instantly know that the email is from a trustworthy source. Another good attention-grabbing technique is to personalize your emails in certain circumstances to engage the user. However, users are becoming desensitized to marketing jargon and over-personalization can be irritating, so use sparingly. In addition if you are able to understand the habits of your users based on the emails they open and its content, you can segment your emails to target specific audiences within your subscription base. This method is a way of personalizing emails without using the over-used ‘Hello Jane.’
Users these days also expect a bonus in their email. In order to keep users interested among all their other subscriptions, you must provide incentives. For example, if you are an e-commerce website, offer users free shipping or 20% off specifically for email subscribers. Not only will these incentives keep your user going back to your website but they will also continue to read your emails. Another way to get users to respond and read your email is to provide calls to action for users to click. Use buttons, highlighted areas, and prominent placement to create effective calls to action.
In an email campaign content is the most essential part, so create captivating, clear, and succinct information that users want to read and find valuable. Structure your email so that headlines stand out and there is a quick summary of the information close to the top for those using preview option in email clients. This structure will let the use know if the email will be useful to them. If you write well-developed and constructive content that your users love to read, they will forward it to friends and increase your audience-base automatically. They can also be directed to your website with links to more extensive content and more detail on a topic. It is well worth the extra effort of creating valuable content.
Some of the effort involved in creating content is to first determine the goals of the email campaign and what you want your readers to do. Whether it is an email promoting a product or discount, a monthly newsletter email for a corporation, or an advertisement to drive traffic to your website, these are a few considerations to determine the campaign goals.
Finally set up Google Analytics within your email campaign to track email opens, clicked links, bounces, and other information about your emails and readers. Fortunately many email campaign management systems provide tracking analysis to measure this data. Finding out the most about your audience will help focus your efforts to make the most out of your campaign.
Following these best practices will enhance your email campaign to make it captivating and efficient so your subscribers will be anticipating each email with bated breath. Combine these techniques with smart content and a well-developed website and your users will be begging for more!
Resources:
Dave Sparks ‘10 Definitive Tips for Writing Captivating Emails’ Six Revisions
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