Email marketing continues to be a popular digital marketing choice for marketers. According to EMarketer, email marketing continues to produce the highest ROI of any digital channel. It makes sense, right? People and companies are constantly connected to their email inbox. In fact, email use worldwide will top 3 billion users by 2020.
“86% of consumers would like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with at least on a monthly basis — Statista survey
OK, SO EMAIL MARKETING = GOOD. NOW WHAT?
So let’s focus on how to create a good email that converts. Here are some of the most widely shared tips for creating a successful email.
Let powerful imagery speak for you: Lots of email marketing experts will tell you to avoid lengthy text in your emails. Why? Goldfish have longer attention spans than people do (or do they? Jury is still out on that one). Whatever the length of our attention spans, apparently we're not capable of reading long chunks of text at a time. Hence the suggestion that you use images instead--hey, pictures are worth 1000 words!
Calls to action (CTA) should be obvious and easy to tap: Again, attention spans = short. People don’t read, they scan, so as a result emails should accommodate for that. If you want to increase the chances that someone will convert by clicking through your link, you need a button with color and a clear (and concise!) call to action.
Videos, gifs, slideshows...yes, yes and YAS! If a picture is worth 1000 words, then a gif is worth at least a billion. A video? Wow, that’s over a kajillion (weird that I couldn’t find ONE internet source for either of those statistics). Videos, gifs and slideshows have been shown to increase click-through rates, increase the time spent reading the email, and increase sharing and forwarding.
Whelp, there you go! These three tips will essentially make you the Bill Shakespeare of email marketing. Congratulations!
THERE’S A CATCH, ISN’T THERE?
Of course there is. I have subscribed to many of the above suggestions. Here’s the thing, will your emails be more successful if you employ these strategies? Potentially. But if these are the best email practices, then why are the daily email newsletters put out by NextDraft, Vox Sentences, and TheSkimm so successful?
IN EMAIL MARKETING, CONTENT IS KING (ALTERNATIVELY TITLED “IT’S THE CONTENT, STUPID”) Thanks to an abundance of free online graphic design tools, creating arresting images and buttons has never been easier. I’m sure that way back when, email marketers felt like they struck gold when they included an image in their emails for the very first time and, as a result, conversion rates increased dramatically. Until other email marketers caught up, their email stood out from all the rest. And again, when email marketers figured out colorful CTA buttons converted more than hyperlinks. Eventually, other marketers eventually caught up. Gifs? I mean, I do believe Buzzfeed owes its existence to the use of their list + gif formula. Now gifs are everywhere.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t include images and video to make your message pop, but there is more to a high email conversion rate than pretty images. No image--even the most creative or beautiful--can overcome terrible content or an unclear message.
WITNESS: THE EMAIL NEWSLETTER
Here’s what really matters if you’re interested in creating emails that convert:
1) KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. CASE STUDY: THESKIMM
Since it was created by Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, The Skimm, a curated daily newsletter has grown to 3.5 million active subscribers--80% of those readers are female. According to Zakin, “The target audience has always been our friends—female millennials.” Weisberg and Zakin’s distinct writing style spoke directly to their identified, key demographic: millennial women on the go. Instead of writing a curated newsletter for the masses, they found a niche market to fill and as a result, they boast a 40% email open rate and the links they include in their text-heavy news updates drive a lot of traffic to news websites.
Who is reading your emails--can you picture him or her? If you can, write meaningful, valuable content to that person. Remember, in email marketing, one size fits all should never be your strategy. Generic emails that speak to everyone aren’t likely to drive the conversions you’re hoping for. There isn't an image, gif, or video will change that.
2) PROVIDE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT. CASE STUDY: NEXTDRAFT
“Most of us don’t want more content — we want less, but better. — Morra Aarons-Mele
NextDraft is another curated daily email written by Dave Pell. As Pell describes it, "Each morning I visit about fifty news sites and from that swirling nightmare of information quicksand, I pluck the top ten most fascinating items of the day, which I deliver with a fast, pithy wit that will make your computer device vibrate with delight."
The content in Pell’s daily email is helpful to readers because that one email provides a way to sift through all the news, information, and content we are bombarded with each and every day. As Morra Aarons-Mele says, “Most of us don’t want more content -- we want less, but better.”
Unfortunately, marketers are under the impression that more, more, more is better. I wrote in a previous blog post, marketers are planning to increase content marketing budgets and the amount of content they will create. In just two years, content marketing will be a $300 billion industry. We’re in the middle of a nuclear arms race style battle to create more, which is why email newsletters like The Skimm and NextDraft are so valuable. They’re easily digestible, usually providing four or five news items each morning, providing links where interested readers can take a deeper dive.
As of 2015, Pell had 75,000 email subscribers and 120,000 NextDraft app users. Do you want that kind of following for your email marketing efforts? Create emails that are helpful or useful to your audience. NextDraft provides readers a solution to the problem of too much content, but too little time. What value is your email providing to your subscribers?
3) WANT TO CREATE GREAT CONTENT? IT HELPS IF YOU CAN RIGHT GOOD.
Confession time: I would give just about anything to be able to write short, clever headlines and witty copy like the writers for Vox Sentences, NextDraft or TheSkimm do. If you think I haven’t completely halted conversations to read the email subject line, lead story headline and at at least a paragraph from any one of these emails, you’ would be mistaken. This brings me back to a point I made earlier in this blog post--it’s the content, stupid.
If you think creating a clever image, a well-designed email and an easy to find CTA button will cover up mediocre content, you may have a hard time achieving success in email marketing. None of these email newsletters have any of those bells and whistles and yet still manage to make waves amid a chaos of information in thousands of email inboxes every day. Why? Good content stands alone.
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