5 Tips For Designing An Effective Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is outpacing direct mail marketing as a means for generating interest and sales. According to ExactTarget, a leader in email marketing, fifty billion emails are dispatched per day worldwide and 88% of emails are considered spam. If you are using email campaigns as a marketing tactic, how can you get your messages to stand out from the crowd?

The average person manages at least two if not more separate email accounts. Cleaning out the inbox is a chore that most people would like to do as quickly as possible. Even with junk filters, most people spend anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes or longer just deleting emails.

While email marketing offers a great low cost way to reach out to your prospects, you must know how to do it right in order for it to be effective. Realize that you only have few seconds to capture people’s attention. Hitting the delete key is even easier than hanging up on a telemarketer, so you need to create an email that within 2-3 seconds makes the person feel the message is relevant to them and potentially valuable.

Here are 5 tips for designing an effective email marketing campaign:

1. Be smart about the subject and sender lines

These two items are your first impression and the most important factors that the recipient considers when deciding whether to open or delete. Keep it short. Forty nine characters is the maximum you should use in the subject line. Avoid clichés, too-good-to-be-true offers or anything that sounds sensationalized. Do use action oriented words. Test a few different words on a small part of your list, and keep trying until you find what works best.

2. Use design to guide the eye along the path you wish it to follow

In the western hemisphere, we are conditioned to read from left to right and from top to bottom, so realize that is that natural path of the eye. Therefore your logo should always go in the upper left hand corner of your email along with a text headline for the message along with the most important part of your message. This is the part that most people will read. Don’t try to be cute and use some fancy font. Use readable text and put your best or most intriguing content on the left. That is where the eye will spend most of its time.

3. Design the message for the preview panel.

Most people read their emails by looking at the preview panel first. Your message should have enough content in it to compel people to open the message into its entirety. Bullet points and borders around certain sections can help make it easier for someone to read the message quickly. If you make it hard people will get frustrated and give up. Make your headline in text, not in a graphic, so that it can be read even if the person doesn’t download the pictures. Also, do create a separate text version for people whose email doesn’t come through in HTML or who are reading it on a wireless device, which is becoming more and more popular.

4. Give the reader a reason to click through, make that the goal

The whole point of sending a marketing email is to get the reader to do something. Remember this and give them something to do. It is a total waste of time if you give them everything they could want or need to know, and then don’t give them motivation to act, or something to act upon. Even though this is a mass email, the goal is to develop a personal relationship between this person and your company, so give them something that they can do, a next step to take. Make this an easy and fast step and make it traceable on your end. Make use of a dedicated landing page, if applicable, rather than just sending them to your home page. Take them to exactly what you want them to see next. When you ask them to fill out a form and give some information, limit it to the bare essentials. People don’t like to feel that they have to reveal too much about themselves in an impersonal format. Remember, this is just a means to continue the relationship. Also, set up an auto responder to send out an email automatically to let them know that you received what they sent.

5. Leave out anything that does not add value.

Avoid the use of excessive graphics, that don’t add anything. They will only add clutter to your already busy prospect’s mind. The brain works in strange ways. A simple picture of a person, might take someone down a long thought path that has nothing to do with your product or service. For instance, one of the stock photos you use could remind the person of a friend from home that they haven’t spoken to in a while. Suddenly they are thinking about giving the friend a call to get together over the holidays. That person’s mind is now a million miles away from your message. Instead use short teaser paragraphs of just 2-3 sentences and then allow them to link to further content. You can then start to track who is interested in what and what really resonated with your audience the most and use that feedback to continue to improve your campaigns. Also, beware of creative content that obscures your message. Good marketers use creativity that helps to communicate the message and great marketers use the creative in such a way that it makes the message stand out, solidifies it in the memory and gets it passed along.

Using these five tips habitually will make your email marketing campaigns sink in faster and produce the results you desire. For more information about how you can improve your business today visit www.flourishingbusiness.com.

By: Elizabeth Gordon

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