A Different Way to Think About Email Marketing
This simple article provides a unique perspective on your emails that hopefully helps simplify some basic concepts.
Each Email is a Landing Page that You Send Out into the World
Of course technically the above statement isn’t 100% accurate but hang in there as I try and make a point.
Each Landing Page is Precious — Your Emails Should Be Too
Your site landing pages are precious and require serious attention and strategy as you test what works and doesn’t work, right? You focus on simple user flow and engagement to motivate your visitors to take specific actions, ideally resulting in a path towards revenue for your business.
With emails you have similar objectives, starting with getting people to open them, then engage with your content and then take some designated action you are requesting.
The point is, if you put the same amount of effort into your emails as you do with your landing pages, good things can happen.
Think of Your Email Journey Like the User Journey on Your Site
Email campaigns are effective when you message content that meets your customer exactly where they are in their journey with your brand. Early in that journey you should be helpful and insightful as opposed to providing call to actions to buy now.
Like your site pages you should provide engaging value-driven content at the top of your emails to encourage more engagement as people scroll down. Enticing headlines with imagery that supports your copy will encourage people to read your entire email.
Create Great Headlines
Your headline is SO important because if people don’t open your emails, you might as well send them into outer space. Spend lots of time crafting headlines that you think your audiences will engage with but don’t be spammy or sensational. Besides the fact that your readers will opt out, the spam filtering technology is getting very good at blocking attempts at sneaky marketing.
Remember Your Single Most Important Objective
Ask yourself, “what is the one thing I want people to do” once they open this email? Multiple call to actions on a landing page or in an email can dilute your attempts for the one conversion you need the most.
It’s one thing if people are loyal customers and they use your emails to browse for sales or new products. But if people are new to your brand, sending them an email with links to 10 products might not get you any clicks.
This is the time you think about pain points and challenges your customers are experiencing. Solve their problems first!
Emails Can Function Like a Blog Page Too
The email you are reading now functions like a fully contained blog page. We’d rather build that trust through educational content that is readily accessible and when our readers are ready, they can reply to the emails or use the links in the bottom section.
The content is also published in our Tips and Tricks section on the site and we post links to each article in our social channel. “Write once and publish everyone” is a guideline I like to use.
Use Email Data Like You Do with Google Analytics for Your Website
Use all the data available to you in your email platform. What subjects and headlines get the most opens? What call to actions work the best? What products are people clicking on the most.
And of course, on the website measure your site engagement and conversions with UTM tags so you can measure performance from every single link in every single email.
Wrapping it Up
So hopefully this provides some alternative ways to think about your emails as individual landing pages you are sending out to your subscribers.
There is a series of articles on email marketing you can find in our Tips section on the site. Au revoir for now.
