Email marketing is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your audience. It is highly targeted by nature due to its permission-based aspect that generally sees people only signing up and giving you the green light to contact them when they are interested in what you have to offer. Whether or not they remain interested in that offering – well, that’s all up to you. Just look at all the emails in your inbox you’ve been neglecting to read and you will see how some marketers are struggling to keep their subscribers engaged. Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take towards creating campaigns your subscribers actually want to open and read.
Make It Look Good
Very few subscribers are going to look forward to reading your message if it wasn’t visually appealing the first couple of times they encountered it. Looks aren’t everything, but when it comes to email, a tight presentation can carry a message far amongst your audience. When trying to hammer out that visually stunning email campaign, keep in mind that a good look goes beyond a catchy logo and rich graphics. You also need to pay close attention to formatting. Efficient use of simple elements like headlines, bullet points and white space can help make your message much easier to digest for the scanners who are short on time.
Maintain Consistency
Some users don’t open emails because the marketer got their hopes up, but ended up letting them down. These users are often idle and have one foot out the door. However, your subscribers will gladly open your message and respond to it when they know they can count on it. If you told subscribers to expect to hear from you once a week, make sure your message is in their inbox around the same time every week. Have your campaigns ready to go weeks in advance if you feel it is necessary to keep up. From designs to frequency, consistency is the key to creating campaigns your audience wants to interact with.
Be Useful
No matter what you do for a living, you can bet that the people you are marketing it to are extremely busy. If the only thing they know you for is trying to sell something in every email you send, they may find your message easy to skip over for something less pushy and more interesting. Your subscribers are pressed for time, so you need to make sure every campaign and every message is worth their while beyond a good deal. Email marketing can help strengthen your bottom line, but driving sales doesn’t have to be the focus 100% of the time. You can garner even more sales in the long run by focusing on being useful in every interaction.
If you’re going to devote the time and effort to email marketing, you might as well do it right. While every campaign may not generate the greatest response, you are for more likely to get the results you desire when giving your readers something they can depend on.