Email Marketing and Staying Relevant
It can be hard to stay relevant as a brand, especially when it comes to trying to stand out in someone's inbox. Although email seems like the last place you should go when trying to successfully market to your audience, it actually serves as a great platform to engage with consumers.
What exactly is an email marketing campaign? Simply put, it is a series of emails that are used to generate leads and engage with current customers in order to achieve some goal your brand is aiming for. They can be used in an effort to increase sales, sign up for an engagement, continue reading along, or add a product to their cart.
How many times do you immediately send promotional emails to junk? We are all guilty of doing it in an effort to declutter. In order to hopefully prevent your email from being shunned to the trash can, here are a few tips we have found that have helped us catch some eyes.
The star of the show: the subject line. The importance of the subject line cannot be underestimated. This is most likely the first thing that the consumer will see - keep it short, keep it honest, keep it intriguing.
Be of service in your emails. Make sure you are providing value to your audience. Think about what you can do for them instead of what they can do for you. Provide useful tips, templates, discounts, and keep them informed on upcoming events. The whole idea of an email campaign is to educate your audience in a way that is easy for them to consume.
Personalize where you can. It is near impossible to appeal to every single consumer, but generic emails will get you nowhere. There are so many email marketing tools available now. Features as simple as addressing each consumer by their name can go a long way. Your email campaigns should be personalized and highly relevant - include content that is trending but keep it authentic by aligning it with your marketing strategy. For instance, we’re pretty sure we talked about the Barbie movie in all of our blog posts since May. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but everyone can definitely relate to the takeover it has had on our digital lives this past year!
Keep your layout simple. You never want to overwhelm your readers with too many graphics or too much information. Your campaign should be clear and easy to understand - if not, it’ll probably end up in the doomed spam folder.
Have strong visuals. Many email platforms such as Mailchimp and more allow you to use templates to create visually-appealing emails. Beautiful imagery and graphics can often be more effective than words.
Don’t overload on copy. No one wants to read paragraphs upon paragraphs when trying to quickly skim through emails. Be as concise as you can, and segment your content so your audience can easily find what they are looking for. If you want to say more on a topic, consider linking it out to a landing page so they can click to it if desired.
Check for grammar. This one should go without saying. Grammatical errors just show carelessness to your consumers. Make sure to edit your email in a way that properly conveys the tone and style of your brand. Warm, persuasive, and engaging emails are the ones that will most likely hold your audience's attention the most.
Three companies that we think do email marketing very well:
Netflix: Streaming services are an integral part of many US households. Netflix provides subscribers with an email campaign that is catered directly to their preferences based on content recently watched. Netflix uses watch history as the key to catching their audience's eyes and provides a skimmable summary of new shows and releases with plenty of relevant visuals. It is consistent, engaging, and intriguing to each individual and is why we give major kudos.
Starbucks: Starbucks uses their marketing campaign to remind consumers of promotions and special offers available. At the bottom of a Starbucks promotional campaign it reads, “This offer is exclusive to you and this Starbucks Rewards account and cannot be reproduced, transferred or used by anyone else.” This screams exclusivity! And we love it!
Venmo: Venmo does a great job with their re-engagement campaign for lost customers. It is mainly an informational email that is simply updating the audience on recent app changes and improvements - ultimately hoping that it will convince readers to give the app another chance.
Email marketing campaigns can seem intimidating and the fear of having your message immediately sent to junk is real! Hopefully now you can decipher some key elements to include if you want to make your next campaign truly resonate with your consumers.
