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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How To Create The Perfect Subject Line

How do you create the perfect subject line?

How do you create the perfect subject line?

When it comes to increasing the open rate of your emails, there is one area that is often forgotten about: the subject line. The subject line is often the first impression you will make with your audience and can therefore make a huge impact on whether your email campaign is successful or not.

So what makes a great subject line and how can you use this within your own campaigns?

1. Directly Speaking To The Audience

If there is one element that is constantly missed it is the mail merge function in email marketing software. You have the ability to address each audience member by name in every email in the subject line. This is perfect for email marketing because it personalises each message going out and ensures you grab the audience’s attention, by making it seem the message was written just for them.

If you want an even better open rate and are a local business, try including a town name or region. Research has shown that this can increase the open rate of emails even better than a name.

2. Change The Subject Line

If you use the same subject line every week or message, then you aren’t going to grab the attention of your audience. They will think it is the same or similar message and therefore switch off from your brand.

One example of this is with People Per Hour. They used to use one message that was broadcasted every single day. Then they adopted a different message to be broadcasted every day and it helped their business triple in size.

3. Promise Something Valuable

Your audience’s time is valuable. Therefore, don’t assume that they will just want to read what you’ve written; you’ve got to offer them something for their time in reading your piece, for example a free offer, a valuable secret (always a winner) or something else you think people will appreciate.

However, you must live up to your promises. Not keeping your word can damage your reputation and harm the success of future campaigns.

4. Avoid Overused And Spammy Words

Most people know that you should avoid words like ‘free’ and ‘voucher’ in email subject lines. These tend to trigger spam filters and messages won’t even be received let alone opened and read. However, you should also avoid other words that are associated with sales and spam such as:

  • Help
  • Percent off
  • Reminder
  • Offer

While some of these might not trigger a spam filter, readers are likely to ignore emails with these words in the subject line.

5. Shorter The Better

We’ve already stated that people are short of time and you’ve got to respect this. This is why you have to keep email copy short for better returns. The same applies with your subject line; try to keep it below 50 characters for the best results. If this can’t be managed, just ensure that it is as short as possible.

6. Ask A Question

Want to know what really works as an email subject line? A question. Even asking a question such as ‘Do you know the best email subject lines?’ and then discussing them, is likely to get a better response than: ‘Here are the best email subject lines’.

Conclusion

Your email subject lines need to be optimised if you are looking to get the best results from your email marketing campaigns. Many of the best practices are easy to implement and don’t cost money. Just carefully choose your subject line to succeed.

What was your last email marketing subject line? Have you got any more tips for our audience?

Let us know in the comments below.

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