Email marketing is a great way to reach out to your customers.

It’s an effective way to inform your customers about your new products, share special deals, and drive new purchases.

It is also just a great way to touch base with your audience, say “hello,” and remind them of your excellent business.

The problem is, most marketers are doing it wrong. A lot of copywriting for online marketing follows outdated rules.

43% of people send the promotional emails they receive to Spam.

This blog will look at which are the features that make up a good email campaign that your audience members will enjoy.

Professional Boundaries

Emails can be unexpected. People are often suspicious of unsolicited promotional emails, even if they know that the email is not from a scammer.

The last thing you want to make people feel like is that their email address has been taken without their consent or being used in ways they did not permit.

This is why it is a common courtesy to transparently give customers the option to opt in or out of promotional emails. Do not hide the fact that they are promotional emails – people respect honesty.

Now, when a customer has opted in, you have the option of sending them a verification email that they must open and click on in order to complete their subscription to your list.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this two-step system. The disadvantage is that less people are likely to go through the second step, giving you a smaller pool of people receiving your emails.

The advantage is that you can be more confident that whoever has persevered through the second step are very interested in receiving emails from your brand, having done extra work to “earn” it. This audience usually comes through with a higher click-through-rate, and you can trust that it represents your “true” audience.

Relevant Emails

You cannot rely on sending “one size fits all” copy in your online marketing emails. People are beginning to leave such emails in the Junk folder.

74% of online customers respond with great negatively when receiving emails that are irrelevant to their interests. This is not to say that email marketers should hang up their hats and give up, it’s simply a message from users saying that they want emails that are higher quality, with more care put in for the readers.

They expect content that is specialised, content that aligns with their interests. After all, social media algorithms achieve this with famous precision.

And the data shows that personalised marketing is here to stay. Emails with subject headings that target specific demographics are 26% more likely to be opened by users.

Not only that, data from DMA shows marketers who successfully group and target their emails enjoy as much as a 760% increase in revenue.

Finding Your Audiences With Data

How does one go about designing a segmented email campaign?
There are several kinds of data that you can use to learn more about your user base, allowing you to understand their interest and behaviours (of course, provided that the users have given you permission to do so).

One data point that you can make use of is their click behaviour – simply, whether they click on a subject heading line, whether they click all the way to wherever the email itself can take them – if your tracking is sophisticated enough, perhaps even where they go on your site and spend the most time.

Use this research to separate your audience into a number smaller groups that share important behaviours in common, and then cater to them in separate emails.

It is important to experiment with a variety of emails and see which ones work best for your different audiences.

For example, one demographic of people might be more likely to open an email if its subject heading contains emojis, but another demographic might see emojis as unprofessional, preferring cleaner subject headings.

One demographic might respond most often to emails that use of statistics, percentages or numbers to demonstrate savings or deals.

For example, one group of people might be very likely to click on an email with the subject, “Save 50% on data in this special deal”, but another demographic might favour more social-based urgency – phrases like, “One night only!” or “Don’t miss out!”

Call To Action – Text

Like any piece of online marketing, emails need the Call To Action, which is what drives the audience to the next desired page.

The first rule of any CTA is that it has to be direct, clear and carry a sense of immediacy.

Do not use passive or weak language in a CTA, such as, “If you want, click here to proceed.”
Assume the sale, and deliver the message with confidence. Your product or service is excellent, and your well-targeted audience member is likely to be interested. If the email is specifically for them, then the product must be, too.

“Redeem yours now.”

Words such as “now” increase the sense of urgency. “Yours” increases their sense of ownership – their buyers’ power.

Call To Action – Graphics And Buttons

There is more to a call to action than the language.

It needs to be visually clear, striking and easy to click on.

It needs be kept above the fold, close to the top of the email so that everyone who opens the email will see it.

It ought to be separated from the rest of the email by blank space so that it is easy to find.

Most importantly of all, your CTA should make it extremely easy for the user to Go To Action. Campaign Monitor found that including a CTA button increased their click-through-rate by 28%.

This is achieved by simply by including the CTA within a big, clear button that the user can click on.

Consistency and Cohesiveness

A cohesive and consistent brand tone across all online platforms is key. It can be easy to fall into the trap of being a multi-personality business, different on every online platform, which comes off as unprofessional and can confuse to the audience.

It becomes a problem if copy writing for emails becomes too widely different, too. You can’t write one email formally, and another informally.

It is important that you experiment and conduct market research so that you can discover different strategies for different audience groups, but you must also maintain a clear and consistent tone for your brand that doesn’t’ break character.

And if it becomes obvious to a customer that your brand talks differently to them – it makes them ask why.

At the end of the day, a customer doesn’t want to feel different to any other customer, even if they are, in many significant ways.

A successful email marketing campaign, in our modern age, is a social enigma. To avoid becoming junk mail, your marketing emails must be written as if you know exactly who you are sending them to.

This is achievable with demographic research, targeted emails and transparent, open data collection. With these modern strategies, you can create an email campaign with higher click-through rates that also captivate, respect and compliment your customers.

Need to know more? Contact the team at Content Box to discuss your email marketing campaigns and start delivering emails that people want to open!