Email Marketing - High Performing Emails

High Performing Emails

Emails have become a part of our day to day life; emails play an important role in our personal and professional life. Email marketing channel has excellent or very good return of investment.

It’s important as a company, business to send customers and prospects emails which has value & this is a delicate balance that needs to be created. This is where High performance emails come in. The Right email at the right time and to the right contact is the key for high performing emails.

High Performing emails are focused on taking essential part of email and to ensure they are optimized to drive your contacts, customers or prospects towards a specific goal. When all the emails are focused on high performance emails it will not only drive high ROI for the business, it will also delight your customers which will create long lasting loyal customers.

Steps to design a high performing email – let’s break this down to sections

· Set the goal

· TO & From section

· Subject line

· Preview Text

· Email Copy

· Image

· Footer

Start with setting the “Goal” of the email and connect each section listed above to align & support the Goal

Key components & Best practices

Goals – While creating the frame work for Setting the goals for emails think of the 5Y – Who, What, When, Where, Why – Identify & answer the 5y’s

Who – Right content to the right contact – this is information that you get from the buyers journey stage (Awareness, Consideration, Decision)

What – what do you want your contacts to do with the emails (sign up, trial etc)

When – when in the buyer’s journey do you want to send the content to the customers,& when will it be most relevant to them?

Where – Where will your contact be reading this email? – (smartphone, desktop, tablet) This means the emails needs to be optimized for each device.

Why? – Why should this email be sent (ask this question to yourself and your design team questions like:

· What is the desired outcome of the email?

· Will it be beneficial to the company or the receiver\contact?

· What is the value your contacts get by reading this email, how does this email fit in with the conversation that you are having with your contacts?

Themes for creating high performing emails

· Selecting the goal

· Optimizing each aspect of the email to drive conversion.

(Conversion is completion of a desired action)

Further two key aspects of the email

Open rate

Click rate,

To optimize emails it means someone to open your email and to take the desired action.

Open email – Several factors that affects if someone will open your email – the subject line, the senders name, and preview text – each of these should be a factor in designing the email to encourage your receiver to open your email.

Subject line – Subject lines with the character limit of 41-50 works better. This is the average character that will appear on a mobile device.

Language - short straight forward, personalize when required and most importantly be creative.

Preview text - this is the snippet of a copy that is pulled from the body of your email, it’s displayed underneath the from name and subject line in a subscriber’s inbox.

Use the preview text to tease the content of your email, add personalisation and show the value of your content that the email provides the customer

Email copy – Write with clarity, purpose and primary goal in mind, this will create an engaging conversation.

· Bold headlines

· Use short paragraphs

· Bullet points

Tone of email - Adjust the email copy based on the persona & context

Personalisation – create engaging and relevant content to your receivers of emails, this will amplify the email copy.

Proof Read – take the time to spell check and check for grammatical errors – Contacts\customers will loose trust over small things.

Call to action – this is the most important aspect of your email , this is the phase that the reader will take the next step which is aligned to your goal.

Frame work for High performing email

Email Template – Aim for a clean, straightforward design to display the value you are sending, A standard template that is consistent across communications such as Newsletters, offers, industry reports etc. creates a good brand image

Footer and CAN – SPAM compliance – The footer should display the CAN – SPAM act compliant, physical address and unsubscribe option.

Email Design and images – Email service provider might not load the images, so ensure a layout which has a visual hierarchy to drive a customer to desired action. Email rendering on different email clients also needs to be checked.

Remember Great emails builds trust, they show you are human, helpful and with each send emails should to value able conversation with your customer.