The Anatomy of a 5 Star Email
Email remains one of the most productive means of generating leads and selling products online. Creating an extraordinary email marketing campaign involves more than laying out some content and crossing your fingers.
Emails with killer click through rates have a special mix of the right content, a stellar layout, and the right underlying strategy. It is important to make sure that you are maximizing conversions and click through rates with every email that you send.
Creating Effective Email Marketing Campaigns
Here is an overview of the 12 components you need to understand and use to create an email campaign that will effectively attract your reader’s attention and win business for your company’s products and services:
1. Creating a Clear, Attention-Grabbing email Subject line
The Radicati Group reported that 1.9 billion non-spam emails are sent every day. To break through this noise, you must develop a compelling email subject line that inspires your audience to click on and read your email.
Remember, if you don’t capture your target’s attention in the subject line, they are never going to see any of the other parts of your five-star email strategy.
2. Listing an Actual Person as the Sender
The name you include in the “From” field of your email can have a huge impact on your overall open rates. HubSpot conducted a number of A/B tests on their own emails, and found that sending emails from an actual person increased both the open and click through rates for their email marketing efforts.
3. Utilizing your Company Branding
Make sure your email marketing templates echo your overall company brand. You want the people opening your email to recognize who you are.
While your emails don’t need to be identical, the design elements should echo your company style. A consistent brand image, language, and tone helps your audience relate to your content and expands your overall brand experience. Consistent brand style also conveys professionalism.
4. Personalizing your Content
Personalized emails can improve click through rates by as much as 14%. Simply including a person’s first name in your email greeting will net a double-digit boost in email click through rates. So developing personalized emails is a great way to gain a competitive advantage in your email marketing.
5. Appropriate Segmentation
Your database most likely includes both customers and prospects – all of whom are at varying stages of their buying cycles. When designing your emails pay attention to how you segment your list and align your email strategies to your list’s needs. Segmentation is extremely effective in boosting email performance metrics.
6. Providing a Clear Value Proposition and Context
Your email content should immediately address what your offer is and why it’s valuable to your audience. Adding a value proposition for your offer as the first sentence in your email copy is the best way to accomplish this. Your value proposition should clearly address the key points of your offer in brief, compelling language.
7. Using an Obvious and Focused Call-to-Action
Your email should have a single conversion goal, whether it is to download an offer, sign up for a webinar or to purchase a product. The call to action button is the link that triggers this action - so make sure that your call-to-action is prominently displayed in your email.
8. Relevant Image
Incorporating images is another tool to differentiate your email marketing. Visual cues are great tools to ensure every element of your email template engages your audience. Hubspot’s Email Marketing research revealed that 65% of people surveyed prefer emails with mostly images rather than text.
9. Social Sharing Buttons/Links
Social sharing buttons and links are great tools for expanding your email marketing and reaching new potential leads with very little effort. Smart digital marketers have learned to use social media channels to magnify the reach of their email marketing.
10. Secondary Call-to-Action
If your recipients have successfully read all the way through the bottom of your email, make sure you provide some way for them to dive deeper into your content. The best way to do this is by adding a secondary call-to-action button at the bottom of your page like a complimentary dessert at a great restaurant.
11. Link to your Privacy Policy
According to MECLABS Email Messaging Optimization Index, one of the major reasons that emails fail to convert is because they contain too many elements that cause the reader anxiety. It is important to remember that many people you are sending emails to may not be comfortable filling in their private information on an anonymous email page.
12. Unsubscribe Link
The final element of an extraordinary email is also the only mandatory element in your email templates. You MUST add an unsubscribe link to the bottom of every email marketing message. Sending an email without an unsubscribe link violates CAN-SPAM regulations which can damage your email sender credibility and potentially leave your marketing open to costly fees or litigation.
Better Email Marketing Methodology Delivers Better Results
By following the 12 steps above you will have effectively addressed the major components required to create an extraordinary email campaign. By following these tips you should see marked improvements in your open rates, click through rates and conversions for your offers.
Our goal in providing this information is to help you learn to better optimize your email marketing strategy and campaigns which in turn will provide measurable results for your business.
