Email is an effective marketing method for nurturing leads, building customer relationships and increasing brand awareness. Email is a vivid and engaging way to connect with your entire customer base. Here are 5 best practices that should be followed when creating email campaigns.
BRanding
Your email campaigns should put your company’s branding front and center. Clear and noticeable branding helps your customer realize that they have engaged with your company before. Studies show that most email users will look for company logos in the upper left corner of an email, but centering the logo in the header is also acceptable. To keep your email readable and cohesive, experts suggest using less than 3 typefaces in the body of your email.
Brand consistency is important across all marketing channels, including email blasts. Your email templates should follow your company’s brand style guide, especially when choosing color palettes, fonts and photo styles.
“A picture is worth a thousand words” which makes images a great way to help tell your story. Be sure to keep image sizes small to keep email load times down. All images should include alternative text descriptions which keeps emails accessible for visually impaired users and also helps describe an image when a subscriber’s email client blocks images.
EMAIL TIMING
Email blasts need to be mailed out in a consistent cadence that your customers can count on. Consistency is key here and more isn’t necessarily better – we suggest sending between 2 to 5 emails per month. It’s very important to track your email campaign statistics (opens, clicks, unsubscribes) to learn what timing works best for your business. Using these analytics, you can learn about the best days/times to send your emails. Monitoring statistics is a continual process where you will learn, change and test again.
SPECIFIC CALL TO ACTION
Emails should be crafted carefully with a specific call to action (CTA) to get your customers to complete an action that you desire. The CTA needs to be direct and appealing and it should be repeated 2-3 times in the email body.
Additionally, don’t forget to include social media links at the end of your email! Social media is a great tool for keeping customers connected to your brand and engaged throughout the sales cycle.
KEEP IT SHORT
The average office worker receives over 120 emails per day. Very few people will read a long email, especially when checking emails on their phone. The best email blasts ensure that their CTA appears above the fold, which means that it is visible in the email without needing to scroll down to see it. We also suggest using a button, instead of just linked text, to highlight your CTA and increase click-through rates.
Because many users will be opening your email on their phone, it is essential to optimize email preview text. Keep it short and sweet! Ideally, your preview text should be between 30-50 characters.
SPECIAL OFFERS
Sales, coupons and discounts are great incentives to include in your email campaigns. Be sure to take time and careful execution to craft a good value proposition that explains the benefits of the offer.
When sending out special offers, it’s a great idea to send time sensitive emails that create a sense of urgency for your customer. Concepts like “hours left before this sale ends” can help develop a pressing need, or even a fear of missing out, that can be a great sales motivator.
Do you need help with creating or managing email campaigns for your business? Reach out to learn how we can help!
