Marketing in Minutes: Email Tips for the Time-Challenged

In the whirl of various marketing tasks that business owners face every day, one of the most critical is managing promotional emails to customers. While handling all the messaging, metrics and followup tasks in your email campaign can involve significant time and resources, there are still some simple techniques you can employ that can help increase sales.

Here are some tips for getting people to take action on your important company emails.

Re-think your approach.email-marketing
Companies still use email, and they do for a reason. If it’s done right, it works. But not all email is created equal. Everyone – customers, prospects, friends and family – we have all learned to filter out noise, so your email needs to be more trustworthy, more relevant, and more personal to make an impact and drive engagement. To get the attention of today’s digital-savvy customer, you need to re-think your approach.

Your subject line is the most important element.
Subject lines matter as much as the content of your emails – actually they matter more, since that’s the tipping point of whether someone wants to read the contents or not. People scan their emails to decide which ones they want to open, so you obviously want to give them a reason to open yours.

If your email didn’t get opened, it is likely to stay permanently in limbo until the customer is reminded of your message in a followup email. But you don’t necessarily want to wait until that happens. Make your headlines matter the first time, and note which ones get the best response. Test different sets of headlines until you get a sense of which ones are most compelling to your customers.  Consider including:

  • time-sensitive or limited offers
  • %-off sale numbers
  • “important” messages
  • exclusive offers
  • things of immediate benefit to customers
  • free stuff and free information

You want them to see a reason to open your email now, not later.

Keep it short and to the point.
We all get a ton of email. And anyone with an in-box knows businesses send out most of it. For your company, all emails are important emails; and the point of them all is to generate a response, reply or action.

If you added up the time it would take to actually read all inbound emails, you would quickly realize that amount of time to do so is simply unavailable for the average human being.  Once you do get your email opened by a customer, don’t ruin your chances of getting it read by publishing a big mass of information. They will get discouraged at first glance and leave.

When it comes to writing a powerful email, less is more. Spend as much time cutting out less-important information as you do adding it in. When in doubt, leave it out.

Place your most important “ask” up front.
Some companies write a very nice email but forget to include a “call to action,” or give a reason they’re writing to the customer. Make sure to include an actual call-to-action and place it as close to the front of your message as possible.

If your email is more complex and requires including a lot of information, as in a newsletter, you can still place your calls-to-action up front, and repeat variations further down and at the end.

Break up longer emails into sections.
When emails do get longer, break them up into easily-identifiable sections. This makes them easier to follow and see the most important parts. If your customer is faced with a “wall” of text, he or she will likely close your email and move on to something else. Give them a reason to be curious about your content and hopefully enjoy reading what you have to say. Bold-face your headlines and calls-to-action, and of course have the most important messaging upfront, so they at least know what to expect.

Make it personal – write to one person at a time.
People are less likely to respond to an email that seems to be addressed to a group. For example, if you get an email that says, “Hey Tom, I want to ask a quick question,” you feel it’s a personal appeal to you. If you don’t reply, you subconsciously feel you’re letting down the sender who is talking to you personally. This is a bit of psychology you can employ in your company’s emails.

You can create this general effect by setting up the bulk of your email as a general message, and then make multiple versions of it as needed. Then you can customize it by adding the recipient’s name at the top and add in certain relevant details. Most commercial email management apps can handle this task, and it’s worth your while to experiment with this feature.

Beyond actually personalizing the email, you should also strive for a personal feel – people quickly sense if a letter seems mass-produced or written in corporate-speak. Take a page from the social media playbook and make your company voice approachable – professional, yet personable. This not only puts a more human face on your company, its shows your customers that your staff is engaged and care about what they’re doing. If your customers know there’s a real person at the other end of that email, they are far more likely to trust you with their business. And that’s a relationship you’ll want to nurture and grow.

Got any tips of your own to share? Let us know in the comments. and stay tuned to this space for more Marketing in Minutes ideas.