10 Creative Email Marketing Ideas to Drive Conversions
Did you know that 9% of American adults say that they’ve never sent nor received an email in their entire lives?Considering the large population of the US, this measly percentage means that there are nearly 30 million adults in America that have completely avoided using email as a communication tool. For the other 300 million of us, email has become a part of daily life which is why email marketing ideas is huge for any business.
It’s no wonder that digital marketers have seized on this method of communication as a way to engage with customers and generate leads and conversions.
If your email marketing campaign could use a little work, check out these email marketing ideas to make sure you’re optimizing your open rate, click rate, and conversion rate.
1. Create an Email Marketing Strategy
Even the best email marketing idea probably won’t lead to as many conversions as you want if you don’t have an overarching email marketing strategy. Basically, you need to first have a plan before you can start.
The first thing you will want to do is define your audience. Understanding your audience is absolutely crucial to connecting with them and writing email campaigns that will appeal to them. Do you want your email list to be full of existing customers, prospective customers, or both?
Once you understand who you want to be writing to, it’s time to build your email list. This can be done by combining your existing customer list with opt-in forms on your website and through using social media.
After you’ve built a solid email list, you can start to develop a content strategy. The best way to begin developing a content strategy is to start off by defining your goals. You can then build a strategy that will help you most effectively meet these goals.
2. Use the Double Open Strategy
If you are using email marketing in order to get more conversions, one of your main goals is going to be to get more people to actually open your emails. One effective strategy to this and is known as the “double open strategy.”
The strategy basically means that you will track the people who did not open a message the first time. You will then resend the same email message with a different subject line to these people who hadn’t opened it the first time.
The best way to do this is to make sure that both your pre-Heather and your subject line are different. You also want to wait somewhere between 3 to 5 days before you resend the message and you want to send it at a different time of day than you sent the first message.
You will find that some people that passed by your first message will open the second one. This can help you lead to more conversions and more revenue.
3. Make Sure Your Subject Line Isn’t an Afterthought
It doesn’t matter how brilliant or inspiring your email is if your subject line isn’t interesting enough to entice anyone to open it. For this reason, you need to focus on your subject line rather than leaving it as an afterthought.
The words that you choose to put in the subject line is likely what determines whether a person deletes the message or opens it. If you do a particularly poor job, they might even report it as spam.
When people check their email, they are looking for messages that matter to them. If it isn’t obvious that there is a benefit to them in opening an email, they won’t.
4. Don’t Overcomplicate the Message
Emails to your clients aren’t white papers, so don’t write them like white papers. These should be simple messages that are written more like blogs than academic or legal documents.
Your email content should be engaging, conversational, and well-organized. You want the information to be easy to digest and compelling.
To accomplish this, you’ll want to keep your paragraphs and your sentences short. Make sure there is plenty of white space to avoid the “wall of text” effect.
It’s also a good idea to incorporate images or even .gifs. Break up information into subheadings or bullet points to make it easy for people to scan your email and get the gist. Make sure that the structure of your content is logical and not haphazard.
5. Be Personal
One of the most important tips for email marketing is to keep things personal. You won’t be optimizing your results if you are constantly sending out the same email message to everyone on your list all at the same time.
Consider dividing your email list into different groups. Perhaps you divide them by their stage in the buyer’s journey or by their personal characteristics such as age or interests. This can help you to be more personal beyond just writing someone’s name in the subject line.
6. Don’t Be Spammy
Email marketing does not have to be slimy and salesy. It can provide real value to readers that they actively appreciate and enjoy. It can help to build your brand recognition and lead to your customers seeing your company as a leader in your industry.
On the other hand, though, people are very sensitive to the notion of being sold to. It is said that most Americans are exposed to somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 ads every single day of their life. This means that people have grown protective over their time and attention and they will be quick to turn away if they feel like something is spammy or scammy.
Things like all caps or tons of exclamation points can scream “SCAM!” at people. Not only will your readers be less likely to open these messages, but spam filters will also identify and flag these types of emails. If you get enough spam flags, your account can get blacklisted, and that’s the last thing you want.
7. Keep It Short and Sweet
People are busy these days.
They don’t have time to read your treatise on your current promotional campaign. If they open a message and it looks like it will take them more than a moment to get the gist, they’ll hit the back button quick. On top of that, they’ll stop opening your messages in the future because they’ll assume they’re always long.
8. Make the CTA Button Irresistible
Just as important as your subject line and your pre-header is your CTA button. It’s great that you got your reader to open your email and read it through. However, if you don’t get them to take any action, you’re left with a missed opportunity.
Don’t use generic call to actions like “click here” or “buy now”. Instead, try to make something more specific, descriptive, and creative. Urgency can be a wonderful tool when it comes to a CTA, such as indicating that a sale will end in just a few hours.
9. Don’t Forget About the Preheader
One of the easiest things to forget about when you are designing an email marketing campaign is the pre-header. This is the text preview that people can see before they choose whether or not they’re going to click on your message. If you use this space effectively, you can significantly improve your engagement numbers and your open rate.
In general, most email clients will display between 35 and 140 characters of this preview text. You can therefore be very careful to craft a message that will entice the recipient to open your email in this initial space.
10. Leverage A/B Testing
One of the best email marketing ideas is to be methodical in your campaign. This means utilizing strategies that can help you understand what is working and what isn’t.
A/B testing is when you have two different emails that you send out to your email list, the “A” email to one half and the “B” email to the other. Each email might have two different CTAs, for example, with different discount codes. You can then see which CTA was more effective and overtime learn how to make bombproof email marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing Ideas: Don’t Forget to Keep Your List Clean
Many people mistakenly believe that the longer their email list, the better. This isn’t necessarily the case, though. There actually a long list of benefits to cleaning your email it including improving your open rates and your click rate percentages.
Before you employ any of these email marketing ideas, it’s a good idea to have your list professionally scrubbed. This means that you’ll only be sending emails to real addresses and not diluting your metrics.
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