Creating great emails by yourself is challenging. Small businesses in particular don’t always have in-house staff or the budget to go to an agency for the more complicated processes. Here are a few main points to always consider when creating a new email template or sending an email.
What do you want your emails to achieve?
You need to firstly establish what you want to achieve from your emails. If you want to send helpful information in order to establish your place within your industry, then you will want to be monitoring open rates to see how many people are engaging with your brand. If you want to gain sales or leads through your emails, then you will want to be monitoring click through rates as this measures how many of those that open your email actually go on to your site or social feeds. Decide what is important to your brand and then design the email template and content accordingly.
Designing great emails
Ensure your email design is responsive. It has got to look desirable on a mobile phone as this is becoming an increasingly popular medium for recipients to check their emails. Brands in particular need to ensure their emails look good on mobile, it’s common to see people on the early morning commute deleting spam emails before they head into the office. Make sure your email is one they open, not delete!
Your email needs to look good across as many devices and email providers as possible. An email viewed in Outlook on an IOS phone will look completely different to an email in Gmail viewed on an android phone, for example. Keep in mind also that images and styles may look completely different on desktop than mobile.
Using images within your emails
Images and animations are great, they make your websites look attractive and professional – however they should not take up your entire email template. Remember that some email providers block images until the reader actively downloads them, so your email needs to be readable without images.
Increasing interaction through email marketing
If you want your customers to both open and click through on emails, then offering an interactive and engaging point is highly recommended. This can be as simple as a ‘read more’ button under a taster of your blog or even a ‘weekly question’ with a click through to the answer.
Personalising emails for your database
The most popular brand emails with the highest click through rates contain special promotions. It’s not always enough to just send a promotion to your entire database though, they should be personalised. You don’t always want to send a regular, valued customer the same deal as a new customer.
Personalisation can be dubbed as creepy- for example when you address the email to a contact by first name “Hey John, check out this offer” despite you never actually meeting. Not all personalisation has to be like this, you can, for example, personalise by gender, job title and location. Tube strike? Email your London based contacts a special offer to cheer them up.
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