Most of us get marketing emails practically every day, and almost all of them get deleted without even being opened. The thing is though that despite this being the case, we can’t help but think any email marketing campaign we’ve spent hours slaving over will get the audience’s attention. Well, the truth is that it probably won’t; the amount of marketing emails sent out reached a record high this year, and that means we’re battling against quite literally millions of competitors… so what are you doing to stand out?
If you’re reading this article, then perhaps you don’t think you’re doing enough, and with that in mind here’s a little list of things you can do to get the readership you’re wanting.
Build a good quality list
This almost sounds too obvious to write about, but if you’ve not spent time building a mailing list of people who are actually interested in your area of business/your brand then it doesn’t matter how clever your email is, it probably won’t get read.
Make it easy to sign up to your mailing list, but not so easy that people can sign up from anywhere – they should already be somewhere related to you before they’re presented with the option to provide their email address. In terms of monitoring success, there are a number of figures you can look at; click-through rate (the percentage of people who actually clicked a link/performed a desired action in your email), conversion rate (how many people completed the task the email was designed to achieve) and most importantly, the open rate. The open rate quite literally means the percentage of people who open your emails, and the latest figures suggest that 20% is average – though you should of course be aiming higher.
Keep things simple
Jargon, buzzwords and other over-the-top industry speak don’t work anymore – people either don’t understand it or have already wised up to it. Email communication should be as similar as possible to face-to-face communication, so talk like a real human, use simple language and make the benefits of reading the email blindingly obvious.
Do the unexpected
This one is especially salient when it comes to those email addresses who seem to have stopped opening your emails lately. Whilst it’s tempting to keep hammering them with the same content everyone else gets, they stopped opening them in the past for a reason and it’s unlikely they’ll decide to start again without some sort of encouragement.
To this end, send this group a special email which does something unexpected – whether this be funny, shocking or whatever else you think will best get their attention and incite action.
Engage with social media
Anything which grabs the audience’s attention (which hopefully you’re aiming to do) has to engage with social media. Make your content easily sharable online by incorporating links directly from the email itself, and do your best to interact with your audience once it’s been shared.
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Of course, before any of this you need to make sure what you’re sending is share-worthy, so try to make it as interesting/exciting as possible and always offer recognition for those who engage.
Rob writes for online marketing consultancy Vision Media.