How email marketing can help your business

Jordon Goodman

Author
Jordon Goodman

How do you deliver your message to the world right now? Are you shouting loud enough? Email marketing allows you to send one message to lots of people. It’s so important within this day and age to keep in line with your consumers’ online behaviour to utilise your offerings, therefore most marketers are lovers of email marketing because they can generate high ROI for business growth. Connecting real users with the right content is so important to portray your brand in the most useful way.  In this article, I will be explaining the importance of email marketing and my favourite email of the month (which has a sneaky twist)!

Key Principles of Email Marketing

Email marketing is a cheap, yet very effective way to target a group of online users with simple email campaigns, offering a trackable marketing route with higher click-through rates than a tweet on twitter.  To the user, they just look like “pretty” pictures created to entice you to click. But to the designers it’s actually so much more. How do you turn the blank, white canvas into click overload? Would you like the best possible results from your e-shots? Well, there are a few key principles to work with in order to;

Establish goals

Goal setting is a crucial; defining goals will help you understand the direction of the campaign, and makes it easier to measure the success. Understanding what actions the subscribers should take, who you are sending the campaign to, and how success should be measured are all key factors to take into consideration.

Build an email list to target

Don’t buy an email list, use real people that will be interested in your product which could include previous customers, users that have opted in from the website, paper forms applicants at events, or anyone that has given you permission to add them to the list. Why waste amazing content on users that are not the slightest bit interested in your service?

Subject line selection

You can create the best email in the world, but if the subject line doesn’t match up to the users expectation you will never get a look in. So don’t oversell, focus on the benefits and pop a few witty words in there. Always test the results to see what users are preferring before rolling out to the full list.

Test & Schedule

An email will look different on every screen and every email client. The difference will mainly affect the design so it is super important to check that an email is readable and visual to as may email clients as possible. Also, try different subject lines by using A/B testing, to give you the best chance of a great campaign. Then schedule for the perfect date and time related to your industry.

Measuring results

A campaign is only as good as the results it creates. So don’t miss an opportunity; use this information to target specific users with other marketing avenues, or even give interested users a call to up sell your services. You can look at metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate to give you a good idea.

Designing high performing emails

Design is a very, very powerful too. Users receive multiple emails on a daily basis, so make sure yours stands out from the rest. A beautifully crafted email can draw the reader in to consume the content. Clear call to actions are crucial to the success of a campaign.

Branding & consistency

Keeping your brand consistent in any email you send out is important. Ensuring the user can relate to the company will help avoid your email dropping into the junk folder. Trust isn’t gained easily. The brand recognition comes from the top, right where your email address is but extends to your logo positioning, colour schemes, tone of voice and content. Personalisation can go far in an e-marketing campaign, humans love to communicate, so utilising this will help conversion.

Responsive email

Have you checked your email today? On more than one device? 2012 was the year when mobile friendly overtook desktop (Campaign Monitor fact) with over 80% of mobile opens on IOS and most of the remaining fifth on Android. It’s super important to ensure your e-shot flows smoothly from desktop to mobile. Larger software’s like Campaign Monitor and Mail Chimp offer a superb previewing tool for both desktop and mobile versions of your campaign.

The Inverted Pyramid

Keeping your message in mind is important, and it is even more important to direct the users to the correct place. It’s so easy to lose touch of your end goal by adding lots and lots of unnecessary information but, by creating the “inverted pyramid” within the design you are driving the users straight to the call to action.

Inverted Pyramid

 

Types of email marketing

email examples

Images sourced from Campaign Monitor


 

Announcements, Events, Deals & Offers

Marketing emails that include product launches, sales, areas of expertise. These will tend to include links to blogs or online reports that users will find useful.

Newsletters

Monthly newsletters and incentive schemes are a great way to keep in contact with your users and gain weekly followers that are interested in the content you are supplying.

Feedback

After trialling a new product, or receiving customer service help, a feedback form will be sent to get the users honest opinion.

Transactional

The basics to any website – password resets, abandoned baskets, and invoices. These emails still need to receive care and attention, sit in line with your branding and be recognisable with your website design.

Life-cycle emails

These emails are specifically created to target click-throughs to a selected site, for example Facebook emailing you when you have been tagged in a post

 

 

 

This month’s best email -retail

So firstly, let me introduce myself, I’m Beth, a 21 year old digital designer. I spend my days designing digital experiences for clients, “colouring in” and sketching. At night, I slip into my whites and chef’s hat to rustle up the most delicious food for my partner and myself, where I love to experiment with new recipes from my little scrap book. I’m a multitasker in the kitchen, so while the oven is on, it would be rude not to pop in a few cupcakes for pudding. By the time tea is made (and demolished within the space of ten minutes) it’s time to sit down, watch rubbish tv and drink tea. Then get back up and do pretty much the same sort of thing the next day! Until the weekend, this is filled with shopping, trampoline fitness classes, walking and watching films. Now you may be wondering why this is important right, thinking okay I’m bored now, but within those 130 words, I have told you, my name, age, gender, job title as well as hobbies and interests. Pretty much the nuts and cogs that hold my life together. Based upon my backstory, I could be the perfect target for your next e-shot, that’s if you are sharing design resources, recipes, and latest clothing deals by my favourite brands.

So this month the best email is retail related, with January and February being my favourite months of the year. “*Sings* ”It’s my birthday, It’s my birthday, I’mma spend my money…” Lots of very clever retailers will target this special day of the year, offering a little gift to you from them, like vouchers, discounts codes and free gifts. These retailers take great pleasure from giving you this, not just to be nice but because off the back of this, they know you will open the email and buy buy buy as a returning customer! How could you resist? This is an impressive marketing tool, yet very sneaky. I mean of course you are going to window shop the desired items in hope that they drop into the sale. It’s an easy returning customer for the retailer. My top three emails that are based around this e-commerce marketing technique are as follows;

Email example

Jordon Goodman

About Jordon Goodman

Meet Jordon, our Technical SEO and PPC expert. Originally from Lancashire, he can eat for England and tends to be a bit of a clown.