Email Marketing Tips: 5 ways to Craft the Perfect Message for your business

Dec 11, 2015 | E-Marketing

Kevin Fouche

Email Marketing Tips: 5 ways to Craft the Perfect Message for your business

Posted by Kevin Fouche, Pixel Fish Director

Kevin handles the planning, design, launch and training of every website that Pixel Fish creates. He ensures that every website is highly engaging and aligned with our client’s goals. With over 20 years of design and web industry experience to draw upon, Kevin aims to pass on his knowledge to our clients and like-minded businesses wanting to grow their online presence.

Make no mistake: email marketing should be a staple of any serious digital marketing efforts. The tactic is not only cost-effective but also consistently rated among the most effective digital marketing tools available. Let’s explore some Email Marketing Tips.

But that’s not to say that every email works equally well. Though email marketing can be incredibly effective, it can quickly become annoying (or, worse, ignored) if you don’t structure your messages just right.

So without further ado, here are 5 tips to help you craft successful marketing emails.

Email Marketing Tips: 5 ways to Craft the Perfect Message

1. Require Opt In

We admit: it’s tempting to buy a list of contacts and email addresses to whom to direct your marketing messages. But in reality, your emails will always perform better if you send them to an audience that has specifically opted in to receiving communication from you. In fact, email software like MailChimp and Constant Contact requires emails only to be sent to opt-in audiences.

Building a comprehensive opt-in email list takes time and effort, but the rewards will be worth it. Email messages sent to opt in lists receive significantly higher open rates than their alternatives. And considering that Australia actually prohibits promotional emails to consumers who have not opted in, you should absolutely make an effort to build your list.

2. A Catchy Subject Line

Here’s a simple truth: if your recipients don’t find your subject line to be compelling, everything that follows won’t matter. They simply won’t open your email, preventing all of the tips below from ever coming into play what you need a subject line that convinces your recipients to open your message.

To achieve that goal, your subject should be short (ideally 50 characters or less), to avoid an arbitrary cut-off in email clients. It should also be action-oriented, compelling your recipients to click. Setting clear expectations for the message that follows, and walking the fine line between being dull and overly promotional, is absolutely crucial. Of course, the following tip also includes your subject line:

3. Personalise Your Message

Message personalisation turns you from a faceless sender of mass emails to a personal communicator with your audience. Most email tools now allow you to use your database in order to substitute in your contacts’ information, such as their first name or another defining characteristic, into the subject line and body of individual email messages.

This type of personalisation is crucial to help your emails succeed. In fact, personalised email messages deliver transaction rates that are six times higher than their counterparts.

4. Get Away from the ‘Wall of Text’

Writing long paragraphs of text was never the best way to structure your email message. But in an environment in which over half of all emails are read on mobile devices first, this point has never been more important.

To make sure your audience remains interested in your email from beginning to end, you should get away from paragraph structures and instead use bullet lists, short sentences, and plenty of visuals to break up your message. Doing so enables you to make sure that once your audience reads your email, they will be ready to read it through to the end and – importantly – take the action you’re asking them to take.

5. Avoid the Spam Filter

Finally, you don’t want to end up in the most dreaded purgatory of email marketing: the spam folder. By following the above tips, you are already taking steps to ensure that won’t happen. But you should keep a few additional things in mind:

  • Clearly identify yourself as a business, preferably with a physical address, at the bottom of your email promotion.
  • Provide an easy-to-find unsubscribe link that gets consumers who click on it on a global “do not contact” list.
  • Walk the fine line between promotional content and conversational style. Too conversational, and your readers won’t believe you. Too promotional, and they’ll send you straight to spam.
  • Avoid spam trigger words and phrases in your subject lines such as “price,” “money,” “double your income,” and more. In many cases, including these words triggers the email provider to automatically send your email to spam, without the user ever getting a chance to even look at it.

Are you email marketing right? Using these four steps, you can help ensure that you are – and set your digital marketing efforts up for success. To learn more about successful email marketing, contact us today!

So how do you get the most out of Business Email Marketing?

Business Email Marketing really needs to be part of a well-constructed Inbound Marketing plan.
Check out this blog for an overview of what Inbound Marketing is all about.

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Kevin Fouché, Pixel Fish Director