We specialize in targeted Email Marketing, Drip Marketing, MailChimp Marketing and Re-Targeted Marketing in El Dorado Hills

Email marketing to a list of subscribers is a gold mine of profit and revenue that you could be missing out on and social media marketing as a resource of outbound marketing can only go so far. These are people who want to hear from you so much that they’ve given you their email address and if they have not directly given you an email address, you have it anyway, so USE IT. Email marketing is a form of outbound marketing that is closely tied to inbound marketing/ content marketing and when used together correctly, you can have one heck of an online marketing campaign.

Why do your email marketing campaigns have low engagement?

The fact is, customers don’t sign up for your email promotions because they have hours every day to click through emails in their inbox. They sign up for your email promotions because they want to save money and get great deals. If you want them to click on your email, you have to convince them from the subject line alone that that is what they are going to get from your email and this is where a little CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) comes in. Here are some tips and tricks to get your customers to click on your emails. If you need more help making the most of your outbound email marketing and getting great returns on your marketing promotions, let Front Street Media run your next email marketing campaign and let us know if you see a difference. Actually, we will show you, that’s why analytics exist.

Send emails from a person, not a company.

Maybe it’s that customers like hearing from a real person. Maybe it’s that having a person’s name in the “sender” field makes them feel like a friend, not a customer. Whatever the psychology behind it, marketing studies have made one thing clear: people are more likely to click on emails that come from a person than from a company.

Check the settings for your outgoing mail. Make sure the sender field has a name, not a generic phrase such as “marketing team.” Also, make sure that the email address you are sending from is in the format of “name@company.com” and not “marketing@company.com.”

At the same time, you do want your customers to know what company you are with, or else they might just mark your email as spam. If you take your company name out of your header, try to include it in your subject or preview text.

Set your preview text.

The preview text is the line of text that appears next to the subject line. This is where you will convince your readers to click on the email. If you don’t set the preview text, the email client will automatically choose the first line or two of your email, ending with an ellipse.

You only have a few characters to catch your reader’s eye and convince them that it will be worth their while to open the email. You don’t want to be wasting space with unnecessary introductory text such as “Dear

[name]”.

Make your preview text short, sweet, and to the point. State what your email is trying to accomplish in as few words as possible. Put an emotional connection and/or a call to action in the preview text. Tell your readers what they have to gain from opening the email, or what they have to lose from not opening the email. Try text like “Don’t miss our huge holiday savings” or “Exclusive 50% off promo codes inside!”

Make sure your plain text version looks good.

Whatever, you’re thinking, everyone except grandmas gets HTML emails. Why bother with how the plain text email looks?

Actually, digital nonnatives are not the only people who get plain text emails. People who have no time to waste may choose to receive plain text emails to save the few seconds it takes to load an HTML email. Not only that, but digital nonnatives who don’t know how to configure their email inboxes can still represent a significant market group. There’s no reason to make it hard for them to read your emails.

You can easily reconfigure your plain text emails in your email editor. Make sure to avoid large blocks of text, shorten your URLs, and make it easy to read. People who don’t mess around with HTML emails are definitely not going to spend time or energy deciphering a messy plain text email.

Link up your images.

Your goal in an email campaign is to get your readers to click through to your website. So obviously you have to have links. But URLs look clunky and make your email look cluttered.

The solution is to use images with embedded links. A call-to-action image that just has the words “Click Here” or “40% Off” in an eye-catching font and bright colors is easy to see, reduces clutter, and shows your readers exactly what they need to do.

Add alt text to those image links.

Image links are the perfect way to increase your click through rate, but there are lots of people who have their emails set up not to show images. When you have call to action linked images with no alt text, your awesome call to action shows up as a big blank space. This is not extremely helpful for your audience.

It only takes a moment to add alt text with a simple call to action to your image links. Set your alt text to something simple such as “Click here for savings” and let your readers know what they are supposed to do with your email.

Use share buttons for easy social media connections.

The more social media shares you get, the more exposure you get. And the easier it is to share your promotions on social media, the more likely it is that your readers will do just that.

It’s easy to add social media share buttons to your email marketing campaigns. It takes just a moment longer, and it is well worth the effort in terms of the results you are likely to see. Social media share buttons are especially effective on sales, promotions and other great deals, but you should be adding them to all your emails anyway.

Note that you should be adding social media share buttons, not social media follow buttons. Share buttons increase your visibility and let your subscribers share your email with their friends. Follow buttons simply let your subscribers follow you on social media.

For help optimizing your email campaign for effectiveness on social media, contact Front Street Media today!

Write the share posts for your readers.

When your readers click the button to share your email, the sharing process needs to be absolutely frictionless. If they have to go to the trouble of writing a tweet or a Facebook post themselves explaining to their followers why they should click the link, they may just click “back” and not bother.

Instead, take the trouble yourself of writing the post for them. At clicktotweet.com you can create a tweet to embed with your share button, complete with text, link, and hashtags. Remember, the easier you make it for your customers, the more likely they are to do what you’re asking them to.

Let Front Street Media help you out.

At Front Street Media in El Dorado Hills, our business is all about helping your marketing succeed, including your email marketing campaigns. Let us take care of your outbound marketing for you, and see the difference for yourself! Whether you are looking for local newsletter marketing or eCommerce newsletter marketing, Front Street Media has done it all before.

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