6 Great Tips for Email Marketing

If you are worried that 99-percent of your newsletters will be relegated to the junk folder, ask yourself this question: Have you been neglecting the process of email marketing for your business because of this fear? If so, you have been losing out on infinite possible conversions every month. Before we delve into some great suggestions to improve your email newsletter marketing efforts, let's talk a bit about newsletter campaigns.

Newsletter campaigns should be viewed as direct messages to people who already know your company and are interested in your products and services. Because they've interacted with you in the past, you have obtained their email addresses, so the only thing standing between them converting to paying customers and you is an eye-catching pitch via email. 

Here's the real kicker: If you're already committed to crafting quality content for a social media campaign or blog, firing off a converting newsletter can be as easy as reorienting your best efforts into an email format. We've seen marketing teams do this for small businesses in less than eight hours of work per month.

So, without further ado, here are six great tips that will improve your email newsletter marketing.

1. Make Your Opener Fantastic

Ask any copywriter worth his or her salt and you'll always get the same response: The first thing a reader lays his or her eyes on impacts the memory more than any other element. Hence, we're suggesting you don't let this go to waste - make sure your subject line is powerful.

Compelling subject lines should be written based on the following rules to grow the readership of your campaigns and direct more traffic to your site:

• Don't use the same format every time
• Keep it under 50 characters
• Make the first phrase refer to something specific that would interest readers all by itself
• Avoid the use of caps or exclamation points, as they tend to trigger spam filters

2. Make Sure It's Readable

Irrespective of whether your subject lines consistently get 30-percent of readers to open your newsletter, they won't be worth much if the content isn't optimized for both mobile and desktop viewing. There's no getting around it: We're living in a mobile handheld device world, with some 54-percent of all emails now being opened via a mobile device. If your content doesn't adapt to whatever platform readers open it on, be prepared to experience bounce rates of well over half of all recipients.

3. Get to the Point

Here's another element we've repeatedly discussed: Today's average human doesn't boast a long attention span, and this statistic is frighteningly lower for the millennial demographic. A mere three seconds is how long users spend viewing emails on average. This means that your newsletter content should be condensed into a handful of headlines and summary sentences.

4. Seal the Deal

Every newsletter should be a vehicle for bringing your readers one step closer to your website, with the ultimate goal being to contact you directly. You begin with your subject line - which you write to convince as many readers as possible to view the email - and then move on to varied content in an attempt to keep readers interested for more than three seconds. In the next step, you must consider the color, shape, and size of your CTAs (calls-to-action), because believe it or not, these factors have huge impacts on click-through rates. 

Consider four to six CTA buttons which are colored to match your company's logo and combine that with a few words that promise immediate results, such as "Get Started Now," "See More Deals" and "Try It For Free." 

5. Test for Results

Content is far from the only factor that equates to a great campaign. Unbeknownst to many business owners and some marketers, the time of day and frequency of email sends make a world of difference with regard to how readers respond to them; the point is, improved performance should always be strived for.

How do you go about this? Try breaking your email list into two or three different groups and compare the results between them to optimize your scheduling. Once you've chosen a date and time, experiment on a couple of newsletters by A/B testing each of the aforementioned variables; for example: One month on which subject line styles see the most open rates, one month on how many segments result in the most click site visits and one month on which CTA design is the most successful.

6. Delegate Marketing Skills

Here's where you take a step back and ask yourself, "Do I have the copywriting, graphic design and data analysis resources to create an effective campaign every month?" If not, it may make sense to outsource this to an email newsletter marketing agency.

Your email newsletter is a way for you to get directly in front of your customers and get the extra touches that you need in your industry to make an impact on them. 

About the Author

Craig Corbel is the VP of Marketing at Solution Web Designs, a lead web design and online marketing firm in New York.