8 Tips For Building Your Email List From Scratch

How can you build an email marketing list from scratch?

Email marketing is one of the most important marketing channels online. For every dollar spent, email marketing is guaranteed to offer the best return. The actual revenue you will generate cannot be guaranteed, but you can assume that the more subscribers you have on your list, the greater the revenue generated.

Therefore, it is important you grow your email list constantly.

If you haven’t started to build your mailing list at all; then this can seem daunting. That’s why we’ve collected eight top tips here for you to build your email list from scratch.

1. Signup With An Email Service Provider

One of the most important tips is to ensure you’ve signed up with an Email Service Provider (ESP), like Fluttermail. A good ESP allows you to control your mailing list, look for patterns and build a list within minutes.

2. Offer Something Valuable

While customers don’t pay you anything for subscribing to your mailing list, they are giving you something important: their contact details. They’ll want something in exchange for that information. E-commerce stores can easily offer discounts, but other businesses need to develop a strong, compelling offer relevant to their audience.

3. Create A Landing Page

Landing pages are great online marketing tools. They allow you to provide information that sells your knowledge and expertise and then offers a deal that leads to a subscription. For instance, if you run an accountancy firm, why not offer clients ten tips about saving money. Then offer them a guide for 10 more tips for saving money if they subscribe.

4. For Every Landing Page Have A Unique Call-To-Action

Every landing page you have, and every offer, you should create a unique call-to-action. A unique call-to-action can help you differentiate the offers on each page. This can help increase conversions and can appeal to different audiences who may differ on requirements.

5. Create Personalised Call-To-Actions

Very closely related to the above, a personalised call-to-action is one that is created based on the website visitor. These aren’t too difficult to create on websites and can be designed on specific pages. Research has shown that personalised call-to-actions can outperform generic call-to-actions by 202%.

6. Have More Than One Landing Page

We’ve hinted at this earlier in the article, but this is one of the most important elements of your list building campaign: have more than one landing page. More than one landing page allows you to target various audiences with different priorities. You can also improve SEO by attracting more backlinks to the various landing pages.

7. Make Your Landing Pages SEO-Friendly

If you want to subscribe lots of people, you’ll need a lot of traffic. The average conversion rate for a page is only 2.35%. Even the top 10% of all performances only subscribe one person for every ten visitors. Therefore, if you want to build a big list, to maximise results you need to generate a lot of traffic.

There’s only one true way to develop this and that’s to ensure that your landing page is ranked highly on Google. There are several elements to this but one way to help is to make sure there’s a lot of content on your landing page. Pages with over 2,000 words rank higher than those with less than 1,000.

8. Don’t Forget To Subscribe Current Customers

Current customers are more likely to purchase again from you and they’ll spend more as well. This makes them an important part of your business. Marketing to them should take priority and therefore, you should be subscribing as many current customers to your business as possible.

These people can be marketed to with latest offers, complimentary services/products and even special events just for them. The advantage is that it costs less to sell to these people than it does to sell to others.

Conclusion

Email marketing is one of the best ways to generate revenue for your business. The trouble is: you need an email list to generate revenue. If you haven’t got one yet, try some of the tips above to help you build your mailing list from scratch.

Have you been struggling to build your mailing list? What tips do you have for building a mailing list?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Mixing Up Content Types In Your Emails

Pick and mix your content types in your emails

Your emails are valuable, but they can also be boring to audiences if they’re always seeing the same content type in every mail. If you want to truly maximise the success of your campaigns, you need to switch content types every so often to keep audiences interested.

In this article, we will be looking at what we mean by content types and how we can mix them up in emails to get better results.

What Do We Mean By Content Types?

Content types is the term used to describe different formats of information and how it is presented. There are several content types you can use. These are:

  • Text
  • Images
  • Video
  • Sound

Each of these content types can be used in various forms, sometimes on their own, and sometimes in combination. For instance, an infographic combines both text and images to create content that is highly informative, attractive, and shareable.

But a podcast can only utilise sound to deliver its core message.

Why Do You Need Different Content Types?

There are many reasons why you might want to use several content types in your email marketing. The first is for adjusting the campaigns to specific audiences. Different audiences prefer to consume content in different mediums and styles.

For instance, recent research into purchasing decisions between men and women have found significant differences. Women make 80% of the purchasing decisions in any given household. They are also more likely to be receptive of adverts with bright colours, unconventional fonts and varying shapes.

Men tend to prefer dark colours, lines and a sleek technical look.

But it isn’t just the look of content that’s important. The type of content is essential to gain maximum penetration of an audience. For instance, busy executives are more likely to want to watch something quick but informative.

However, those who are browsing online later at night might prefer something less noisy and want text with images.

Mixing It Up

Another reason why content types should be varied is to pique the interest of your audience. If audiences see text every week, they are quickly going to get bored. However, if you slip in a video, podcast, or image every so often, it helps to break the monotony and grabs the attention of the audience.

Another important point is that some messages are better conveyed using images than text. Other messages might need more, detailed information, so require text. So it also depends on the message you want to send.

Mixing Content Types For Better Results

Of course one of the best ways to ensure you are maximising the results of your email marketing campaigns is by using a combination of content types. Images can be used to articulate certain points that are difficult to understand.

A good, funny, cartoon sketch might be a great way to add some humour into a challenging topic.

Or you could use images/videos to quickly describe the main points of a message and then use text to go into further detail for those that are more interested using text.

The major point here is that everyone is different and while the majority of people prefer images against text – that isn’t always the best solution.

How You Can Reach Maximum Results

Your email marketing campaigns need to have the best content types to maximise returns. This sometimes means you need to use certain designs or content types to generate interest in your message, which can be based on your core audience.

However, using the same content type continuously can result in poorer results in the long-term. That’s why it’s important to mix up content types in emails to ensure your audience is paying attention.

What content types do you use in your email marketing campaigns? When was the last time you made a switch?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Why Your Marketing Emails Need Less Marketing Content

Adding media can help reduce the amount of content needed on an email and improve ROI on campaigns

Emails are the perfect channel to get your sales message across. They are easy for audiences to digest, they can sit in inboxes until the subscriber is ready, and you can track results. All these reasons make emails one of the best performing digital channels for ROI.

However, one of the biggest mistakes that small businesses make when they’re creating emails is to put too much content in the copy.

Email design and content can be pivotal in making a campaign a success or failure. And while some small business owners might think that more is better – audiences tend to prefer the opposite. In fact, emails with too much content can lead to poor sales and high unsubscribe rates.

But why might audiences not like too much content in an email? Here are some of the top reasons, and how you can turn it around without losing any of the power of email marketing.

1. Audiences Have Little Time To Read Too Much Content

One of the biggest reasons is that too much text takes time to read and audiences don’t want to spend hours reading. They want to know what’s important, quickly, and what they need to do next to solve a problem, find out more information, or learn something new.

There are several ways you make it easier to get a message across. Firstly, you can break up long pieces of text into little sections with clear headers explaining what is being said in each section. Audience members with the least time might then skim-read your email, deciding what’s important to them based on the headings.

Another option is to use images to communicate your messages. Images can portray more than words in a given space and can be read and understood faster by audiences. So they make a great option.

2. Audiences Don’t Want Too Much Information

Audiences really only want to know what’s important to them. You might have a great backstory as to why you’re celebrating your business’ five year anniversary, but to your audience, that story isn’t that important. They want to know what the point of the email is: i.e. what’s in it for them.

By all means, write your incredible story, but put it on a landing page for those interested to read it. On your email, be short, clear and very concise. That way you can keep audiences happy and get them to take actions on your emails without losing their interest.

3. Too Much Content Can Seem Pretentious

Audiences don’t want businesses that make themselves seem more than they are. Emails with too much to say make the business sending them look too pretentious. This can lose you trust. Your subscribers will look somewhere else.

Instead, you should be focusing on ensuring your audience feel as if you are all part of one team. They want to know that you see problems from their point of view. Keep your content grounded to ensure you do this, by losing the jargon and not talking too much.

4. Audiences Want To Read Content From A Human

Too much text just looks like a book, something that’s impersonal and not unique to the reader. When you write less text and content, you might find that your audience believe the email was a personal one, something that was developed for them.

This, with other personalisation options for your email, can help you improve your campaign’s success.

Conclusion

Don’t be the business that falls into the trap of having too much information in email campaigns. While you might think you are giving audiences everything they need to make an informed decision, you are more than likely just giving them a reason to unsubscribe.

Be more concise in your email marketing campaigns and see how your success grows. Use images, graphs, videos and other tools to help communicate your message and never write too much.

How do you make emails more concise? Have you ever received an email with too much content?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Metrics You Need To Track Beyond Open Rates

What statistics do you need other than open rate?

When small business owners look at their email statistics they usually focus on one specific metric: the open rate. It’s reasonable to assume this is an important metric. After all, those who’ve opened the email will have read it.

However, email marketing should always go far beyond reading an email. Your business should be looking at generating more interaction and results, and for that you need more metrics. The more you measure and assess, the better you can tailor your future campaigns for your audience for greater results.

So what are the other metrics you might need and what are you looking for in them?

1. Click Through Rate

Most, if not all, small business owners know this is an important metric. Not only does it signify that your business’ emails are being read, but people are clicking through for further action. If you aren’t monitoring this, then you need to immediately look at.

A good click through rate can be tough to generate. Some industries have low rates, while others can have high achievements.

It can also depend on the type of email you are sending. If you are sending a notice about store opening times, you can expect lower clicks than if you were offering a special discount.

2. Unsubscribe Rate

This is another important metric which should be high on your list to monitor. The problem is that very few business owners really take notice. Essentially this metric is the number of people who have unsubscribed from your mailing list and will no longer receive information from you.

There are numerous reasons why they might unsubscribe, such as no longer being interested in your brand, or they have all the information they need from you. Alternatively, they may feel that your emails are an intrusion into their day or that they never subscribed in the first place.

You need to monitor this. If your unsubscribe rate goes above 0.5% then you need to consider changing tactics and looking at your emails for better content.

3. Bounce Rate

Another vital statistic is the bounce rate. There are two types of bounce rates: soft and hard. Soft is where there’s a temporary problem with delivery of your email (full inbox, their server isn’t working, etc.). A hard bounce is more long lasting and demonstrates that you’ve been blocked from sending them mail or the email address is no longer active.

Any, and all, hard bounces should be removed immediately. If you have a significant number (more than 0.5%) than you need to investigate why. Someone could have reported your emails as spam or you could have an old list.

Monitor the soft bounce rate too. Find those who continuously soft bounce and remove them as well.

4. Return On Investment

This is probably one of the more interesting metrics that small business owners want to measure, but often forget to. The Return on Investment is the amount of money made for the cost of sending the email.

Don’t forget to include all costs including time to create, format, test and send the email as well as the cost for any images, text etc. you’ve purchased.

Most businesses can expect to receive an ROI of about $44 for every $1 they spend on email marketing, but it does depend on your industry and the type of email you send.

In addition, it can be harder to determine email ROI if you offer long-term services. For instance, if you sell a monthly subscription, the ROI is about the lifetime value of the customer, not that first purchase.

Conclusion

Monitoring the performance of your email marketing campaigns is vital for the successful continuation of your business. However, you need to know what you should be monitoring and what are the best benchmarks.

Use the above metrics as a quick guide of the essential metrics you should be looking at.

What do you use to monitor email marketing performance? Do you perform better or worse than expected?

Let us know in the comments below.

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The Most Effective Win-Back Email Strategies

How can you use email to win customers back?

You’ve worked hard for your email subscribers, so there is no doubt you will want to keep as many of them as possible. The problem is that those who aren’t responding to campaigns are holding you back.

Any subscriber who hasn’’t opened an email in the past six months, should be considered for a re-engagement campaign. A campaign where you try to reach out to them and attempt to re-introduce them to your brand to get them to actively read your content again. This can be challenging because they’re no longer reading emails.

So you have to be creative with what you send. The subject line must be something that attracts their attention and then the content inside must also be convincing.

There are several strategies to do this. And a re-engagement campaign doesn’t need to be just one email. In fact, you could have two or three emails in a sequence which form a story to re-engage the audience.

Here are some of the best so you can continue to enjoy a large, strong and valuable email subscriber list.

1. Notice Their Absence

One of the first things you should do is acknowledge their inattentiveness to your emails. This can be done with a clever subject line such as:

  • We haven’t seen you around lately…
  • Have we got the right email address?

Highlighting their absence is a way to get the subscriber thinking. They might wonder why they they haven’t been reading emails and as a result, open a few. Or this might be a push for them to completely unsubscribe. When creating the first email, try to make the subject line personal and a question if possible. Questions tend to get higher open rates.

2. Tell Them You’ve Missed Them

Making it personal is something that is important in email. Personalisation has always helped improve open and conversion rates. That is the same with a re-engagement campaign as any other. There are many ways to make an email personal, but you don’t even need to include any identifiable information.

Just by saying you’ve missed the subscriber can make the email feel personal and not a mass-sent campaign.

3. Let Them Know What They’ve Missed

At the same time as telling them that you’ve missed them, in the email copy you should let them know what they’ve missed. Highlight some of the offers you’ve sent in the past couple of months and how many people have enjoyed them.

Consumers can sometimes feel disappointed when they’ve missed out on something good. This can sometimes move them into more active engagement with your brand on its own.

4. Offer Them Something For Returning

At the end of the day, you want the subscriber to come back to your brand. Therefore, you need to offer them something. This could be a discount, free gift or something else. The important thing here is to ensure your offer is not as good as other offers in previous email campaigns. Otherwise they could avoid your emails just to get better offers.

Ensure that this offer is unique to the person as well. You don’t want those on the re-engagement campaigns sharing codes that anyone can use.

5.Use Media To Convince

Another great strategy in your emails is to use media to portray the message. Text is less convincing and harder for audiences to read, especially on the go. Therefore, send your message with the help of videos and images.

A video of your team waving at the subscriber can be a great visual in your last email. It could evoke images of them saying goodbye or waving them hello.

Conclusion

Your email subscriber list has to be strong to be of any value to you. That is why you must regularly assess it for engagement levels. Removing those inactive subscribers is a good way to keep costs down and your campaign statistics healthy.

However, before removing your inactive subscribers, you should attempt to re-engage them campaigns. Use the above strategies to help you to bring more of them back and turn them into active subscribers again.

How often do your run re-engagement campaigns? What tactics do you use?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Outdated Email Marketing Strategies That Hurt Your Brand

email marketing strategy

Make sure you’re using the best practices in your email marketing strategy

Just like with other types of marketing, email is changing. There are new strategies, design trends and best practices to match the current global economies preferences. When using outdated strategies, you’ll find your brand can suffer.

There are numerous ways you’ll see if your brand isn’t doing so well with email marketing. You’ll have lower open and click through rates. Less people reading your emails is a lost opportunity. Especially as email marketing is one of the best ways to sell online.

Open rates could be low because your audience aren’t interested in your message. Alternatively, your emails could be landing in the spam box and just being deleted.

You’ll also likely have a high unsubscribe rate. These are people who are annoyed with your message and want nothing more to do with you. Loosing valuable subscribers is concerning. They’ve shown interest in you before, so you should be doing everything you can to keep them with you.

By eliminating the outdated email marketing strategies from your campaigns, you can rectify this. But do you know what’s outdated and what’s not? Here’s a quick checklist for you.

1. Using The Traditional Newsletter

The days have gone when you could cobble together some news onto one sheet and send it to your audience hoping that would inspire them to contact you. Firstly, audiences aren’t always interested in the same things you are.

Secondly, they have limited time to read lots of information on a newsletter. As newsletters tend to be long and boring, you’ll find any promotion or sales message in the letter will be lost in the mass of words and stories you’ve compiled together.

Thirdly, they want to know how reading the mail from you will benefit them. If there’s little in there to help them solve a problem or advise them, they won’t read it.

2. Sending Every Mail To Everyone

One of the biggest mistakes that brands make nowadays is to send every email campaign to all subscribers. This is really outdated. There’s so much technology available that you should really be able to avoid this.

Mail campaigns should be targeted to subscribers based on their previous engagement and behaviour. So if they’ve been looking at buying boy shoes previously, send them information about different brands of boy shoes.

Don’t send them countless emails about shoes for girls. It will only annoy them and demonstrate you have no idea of what products they are looking for.

3. Too Much Content

This is one is understandable and an easy mistake to make, but that still doesn’t mean you should do it. Too much content can be a pain for audiences. They want something quick to read so they can make a decision and move on.

If you put too much information into an email, you’ll find that they’ll skip lots of the content to get to the bottom. Therefore, they can miss out on vital stuff that could persuade them to buy. It is much better to limit content to just the key points, perhaps in bullet point form. Keep text to under 300 words can also be beneficial.

4. Thinking A Name Is Personalisation

Audiences aren’t dumb. They know the technology is there that places their names at the top of an email or in the subject line. So this tactic is now almost completely useless. If you think that’s personalisation, you need to rethink your marketing strategy.

Instead, personalisation is about using their behaviours to identify content they want to read when they want to read it. For instance, if they are looking at oak kitchen work surfaces, send them a deal on the latest oak kitchen designs.

If they haven’t visited in a while, sending them an email saying you miss them is a great way to re-engage them. But its about sending them content that is relevant to them. Not just putting a name at the top of the email.

Conclusion

Email marketing is evolving just as audiences are. You need to adapt your email strategies accordingly, so you can ensure your brand is making the most of your opportunities and not losing out from strategies that are outdated.

What new strategies do you use? What strategies do you consider outdated?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Making Email, Social And Content Marketing Work Together

Social media, content marketing and email marketing should support each other for you to get the best results.

Digital marketing is about attracting, convincing, and selling to customers. There are many ways to do this, but one thing has been clear for a number of years: that it takes more than one or two interactions to sell to the majority of customers.

In fact, research has shown that 80% of transactions are not made until the 5th and 12th interaction with a brand. This can be hard to achieve on one channel, which is why you need as many channels as possible, working together to create a sales funnel that creates those necessary interaction points as quickly as possible.

Why Use Multiple Platforms To Market Your Product

There are many who believe that one sales channel is their only way to achieve sales. However, this is a flawed system. If you used emails exclusively, you might need to send 12 emails to get them to buy. If you send one email per week, that’s 12 weeks to generate the sale, a long time, and that could mean you lose out to a competitor.

However, if you use a mix of platforms, you might catch the eye of the consumer at several points of the day. For instance, when they check in on Facebook and see some of your content (organically or paid) they are making an interaction.

When they are doing some research, with good SEO work, they might see some of your content on the subject and then read it: another interaction point. Therefore, when you next send an email, your potential customer isn’t just on interaction point one, they are on interaction point three or four.
However, if you don’t have these marketing channels aligned, you might be doing more harm than good to your marketing. Instead, you need to find a way to combine them into one campaign that’s mutually beneficial.

How To Combine Platforms Into A Single Campaign

The first step to combining platforms into a single campaign is to ensure that each platform is connected to the others. You don’t want each platform to just connect to another, you want to include as many platforms as you can from the other platforms.

So for instance, on a piece of web content, whether it’s a landing page, downloadable content, or blog post, you need to connect it to your social media accounts and mailing list. On your emails, you should direct them to a landing page and also social media profiles.

The challenge is on social media. Here, each piece of content should refer to just one link, e.g. a mailing list, or web content. But generally, with your social media campaigns, you should refer to all your other platforms equally.

You’ll then need to find a way to direct audiences to the next platform. This can be done with a good call-to-action. A good call-to-action should include:

• Urgency
• Definition of the action you want them to do.
• Time delay.
• An interesting offer and/or promise.

Finally, you need to consider how each piece of content is connected to the next. You want to take the customer on a journey where each interaction is another step in a single journey. So, if you sent an email about cooking a holiday meal, you could have call-to-action about the desserts or games for the festive meal. As long as it’s relevant and adds value for your customer, then you’ve got some good content. Here you have at least two interaction points.

Another good example of this would be offering people tips on social media about cooking, and linking that to a landing page where they can subscribe to a mailing list for ingredients, cooking instructions, etc. This scenario has at least three interaction points.

Therefore, by connecting marketing on all channels, you can cut down the time to sell from up to 12 weeks to under three weeks.

Conclusion

Selling online can often mean that you have as many as 12 interactions before your customer makes a purchase. This can take a long time if you only use one platform to sell. Instead, you need to combine social media, web content and email marketing campaigns to minimise the time it takes to sell to your customers.

Do you combine your marketing platforms? How do you ensure they are aligned?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Keeping Open Rates High Even When It’s Not A Holiday

People may not be jetting off on holiday, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want some holiday cheer in their emails

When it comes to email campaigns, there are a few signs of a healthy list. One of them is your open rates. During any holiday period, you can expect your business’ mailing campaigns to have high open rates. After all, this is the time when your prospective customers have more time and tend to spend more.

However, you don’t want to be limited to just the holidays for successful campaigns. This could waste a lot of time and reduce your revenue potential. So how can you improve your email’s open rates to keep your campaigns alive? Here are our top tips:

1. Promise Something Sensational In Your Emails

Your audience are curious and if you promise something sensational in your emails’ subject line, it doesn’t matter what time of year you’ve sent it, you will peak some interest.

Of course there’s the problem of being too sensational. Some of your audience will think you’re either lying or just trying to seek attention. At the same time, when you create a sensational headline, you need to fulfil the promise you’ve made. Otherwise your audience won’t carry on their purchasing journey.

In addition, if you can’t match audience expectations, then later campaigns will suffer. This can be damaging to your whole brand as some sources state 80% of your sales will happen between the 5th and 12th interaction. If your audience abandon you before those interactions because of unfilled promises, you’ve lost out.

2. Emphasise The Benefits Of Reading

The one question your audience will be asking when they receive your email is why they should read it. Therefore you need to answer this question in the subject line and pre-header text.

The reason you give should be something that benefits the reader. While most e-commerce stores concentrate on discounts or special offers, it doesn’t have to be this. It could be some key information to improve their life, or giving them free information about how to save money.

3. Use Lists And Tips

One of the easiest forms of content to read are lists. By using your email campaigns to distribute and publish lists, you can attract lots of readers whatever the season. You can always use the anticipation of holidays for list creation. For example:

  • Five foods you need at a Thanksgiving dinner.
  • Ten top presents for fathers day.
  • Three holidays you can’t afford to miss.

You can also improve this by moving away the transactional emails (i.e. attempting to sell a product/service) to creating a list of tips for your audience. For example:

  • Five tips for a stress free Thanksgiving dinner.
  • Three ways to save your career today.
  • Ten quotes to inspire your children at school.

4. Keep Your Subject Lines Short

With more emails being opened now on mobiles, it’s important to keep your email subject lines as short as possible. Generally it’s recommended to keep them under 50 characters. That doesn’t seem like a lot of room, but consider that all six subject line examples given in point three don’t have more than 50 characters, you can see that there’s a lot potential for you to write.

5. Play On Positive Emotions About Holidays

Sometimes it can be really good to rely on the emotional pull of a holiday in order to get people to pay attention to your emails. Think about the positive emotions that are associated with Christmas, Thanksgiving and other holidays. Could you play on these emotions in your email campaigns? For instance, “Get that Christmas morning feeling back!”

Conclusion

While holidays are great for email campaigns, you need to generate interest in your products/services all year round. Consider how you can use your subject lines to create exciting and compelling reasons for your audience to open your email at any time of the year.

Do you have open rates that are poorer outside of the holidays? How do you get them better?

Let us know in the comments below.

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5 Ways To Turn Emails Into Engaging Experiences

Make your emails more interactive with readers!

Emails are one of the best ways for you to create an experience for your audience that will sell. In fact, email has been found to be the best sales platform online for over a decade. Audiences trust emails when they’ve subscribed to a list, and they enable you to offer relevant content.

However, there are many missed opportunities when it comes to selling via emails; especially when audiences are looking for an engaging experience.

So how do you make more of your emails and engage you audience? Here are five techniques to try in your next campaign.

1. Start Designing Emails That People Want To Read

Before you start implementing new software or strategies with your email campaigns, you need to create effective emails, to begin with. There are several ways to do this without making to many changes to your campaigns.

These tactics include:

  •  Stop using jargon or inside-industry talk.
  •  Use engaging subject lines, preheader text and titles in the email.
  •  Use personalisation.
  •  Ditch the passive voice.

Use these tactics and you’ll start to see better open rates and readers spending a longer time on your emails and landing pages. You might see a higher click-through rate too.

2. Use Videos Within Your Email Campaigns

Videos are highly engaging and very memorable. They can also be attached to email marketing campaigns with ease. This makes them valuable, especially as 81% of people have been persuaded to make a purchase after watching an explainer video.

As emails are already highly effective at selling, adding video to the mix will increase their effectiveness. At the same time, you can improve your reach online by having the videos hosted on YouTube. Every subscriber who watches your video will then count towards the views count, and the more views you achieve, the more your video will be promoted.

Videos should be short, so try for under two minutes, and have a clear call to action at the end.

3. Use Polls, Surveys And Quizzes To Engage With Audiences

Users love polls, surveys and quizzes; especially if they’re not serious, a little bit fun, and don’t give too much information away. For instance, if you sell a range of dolls, you could have a fun quiz matching the audiences’ personality with the dolls’ characters.

Polls are also great, as people get rewarded by seeing their votes count for something. For example, you could offer subscribers the choice of what new flavour you will develop next, or what video you will create. These interactions help you to see what audiences are looking for and guide your content creation strategy.

4. Send Emails At The Right Time

You know what makes emails really engaging? Them being delivered at the best time for your audience. If they are in the mood for reading your email, and have the time, they will read your email. But if you send it at a time when they are too busy, it could be lost.

There are few ways to determine the best time for sending email campaigns other than A/B Testing. This should be done almost continuously. It doesn’t hurt to segregate your list either into different groups that read their emails at different times.

5. Keep It Short And Simple

Another really good way to get your emails to be engaged with, is to keep them short and simple. The less information you have on the email, and link to a landing page, the more click-throughs you are going to get.

However, you will only achieve a better click-through rate if your original premise has several elements including:

  •  An emotional need from the audience.
  •  A relevance to the audience.
  •  Ease of access to the audience.
  •  Something to intrigue them that the next step is different.

Conclusion

Email marketing is really effective and with a few tweaks you can boost their effectiveness and earn more revenue from your campaigns. The five simple tactics above can help you get that better engagement experience for your audience and make your campaigns generate great returns.

How do you make emails engaging? How do you determine what an engaging email is?

Let us know in the comments below.

Image supplied by Pixabay.

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Making Non-Profit Emails More Effective

How to make your nonprofit emails more effective

Just because you are a non-profit, it doesn’t mean you can’t have an effective email campaign that grows awareness for your good cause and builds donations to help you continue with your activities.

Here are several ways to create better-performing emails for your non-profit.

1. Tell A Story

People love to hear about stories. That’s why reality television is so popular and how so many celebrities like the Kardashians have grown their brand – they’ve told a story about their lives. The same can be said about your brand and its good work.

You can tell the story of how you have helped people with your non-profit. Have you helped to educate people so they can start new jobs, support themselves, etc? These are fantastic real-life stories people like to read and interact with.

2. Tell Them Why You Need Donations

Research has consistently found that giving a reason for why you are making a request can improve positive results. Therefore, consider telling people what you are spending their donations on.

There are numerous ways you can do this but try not to be too general. Saying that you need donations to continue your good work is less likely to work than being specific about a project you are running.

For instance, you could state that you are looking to raise funds for new equipment. Name the equipment, what it is used for and how it will benefit your activities. This way, people can see how they are directly helping your non-profit.

3. Give Rewards For Interaction

Some people like to be recognised for their contribution to good causes. That doesn’t mean that they want a badge, pin, teddy, etc. for every donation they make. Sometimes recognition can be just as good. Therefore, consider ways that you can reward your patrons.

It might be something as simple as regular newsletters about a particular project, membership to special content created just for donators, or public recognition of their contribution. These can be simple to maintain.

Another thing to consider is that not all contributions are monetary. Some are based on spreading the word of your business. This can be just as rewarding for your business because if one person introduces three new donators to your non-profit, then you have three times as much towards your next project. Rewarding this person should be done, even they haven’t contributed funds themselves.

4. Test, Test And Test Again

Another important aspect of email marketing is A/B testing to ensure you are getting the most from your non-profit’s emails. Something as simple as the time of day you send emails can have a significant impact on the results.

You want to A/B test your email marketing campaigns to ensure you are getting the best results. In reality, testing is unlikely to ever stop as there are numerous tests that should be carried out such as:

  • Time of sending.
  • Colour of buttons.
  • Language used.
  • How you address subscribers.
  • Subject lines, pre-header texts, etc.

5. Use Images And Videos

Text is harder and more time consuming for readers to digest. Therefore, text-only emails are going to have poorer results than those that include images and videos. Ensure you are always including something that is relevant to your email.

Videos can also be kept on YouTube or another video sharing website that can give you long-term benefits. Images can also be used on a website where they can contribute to your search engine rank.

Conclusion

Your non-profit needs to generate interest and donations to operate. Email marketing is a fantastic way to help with both of these, but they need to be effective. With the right words, images and other elements you can sustain your non-profit and continue to support good causes.

Do you operate a non-profit? What email marketing tips do you have?

Let us know in the comments below.

Image supplied by Pixabay.

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