Now here are some ideas how this can be changed…
Questions: Look at the following email from ElegantThemes. Including simple question words like “why,” “how” and “what” in your subject line can create inquisitiveness in your reader and encourage him to click.
Catchy headlines: I love this headline – “Man Bites Dog” – from Business Applications Digest (TechTarget again). Although there is no continuance in the body of the story, the headline is good enough to get a click. Think of catchy headlines as your favorite crostini or meatballs. Do you like them mushy or soggy? Apply the same rules to your email headlines.
Storytelling: Using storytelling in your emails is better than click-baiting – it doesn’t just attract readers but also keeps them hooked. It encourages recall too. Everyone loves a good story; it’s in our DNA and no one can fight it.
Product pitches: When it comes to promotional emails, things can become sticky very quickly. Here are a few things you can learn from this email from a project management SaaS provider: soon after I signed up for Wrike, I got this email from their founder and CEO, which I think works way better than getting an email from some sales rep. It’s a perfect example of how straightforward, honest pitches should be. It doesn’t have images or color, but the content does all the talking. [comments mine]
A lot of these tips aren’t new, but what I am trying to prove here is that even boring software businesses can turn their brand around with the help of crisp and catchy content.
Layout
What I always fail to understand is why tech emails have to be so colorless. Blues and whites seem to be their only choices of colors. I love what CyberLink has tried here. It uses bold pictures and colors, and the layout is incredibly clean and user-friendly.
If however, you want to send strictly text emails and still want them to make them more aesthetically pleasing, here are some layout styles you can follow. These layouts are designed to provide enough breathing space between each section and allow you to categorize news/stories in a hierarchy of importance. This not only makes them easy on the eyes but also ensures your most important messages are not missed.
It is about time technology sites and software providers started making their emails a little more pleasing to the eye rather than those immensely cluttered and randomly thrown-together lists of links. Apart from a few forward-thinking startups, no one seems to have mastered the art of aesthetic email marketing.
That said, well-designed emails need not be expensive or resource-intensive. An uncomplicated email marketing suite such as GetResponse makes designing and optimizing emails with personalized layouts a breeze, with pre-designed email templates, free stock images, and a responsive email builder that doesn’t need coding.
Frequency
We come across the “right times” and “right number of times” to send email all over the place. And every study varies from every other study in its results, industry and insights. While Rohan Ayyar wrote the seminal post on email timings over at the Search Engine People blog, he offered a nail-on-the-head sum up: “Persistence is key, together with content quality and segmentation.”
If your website generates a lot of awesome content and a weekly or monthly roundup won’t do justice to all of it, try customizing your email lists based on the type of content and handing over the control to your subscribers by asking them to select the frequency and type of emails they wish to receive.
While you’re in the formative phase of your email marketing strategy, lock in the schedule for your drip campaigns, newsletters and promotional emails. Here’s a prototype that might help:
As they say, strike the iron while it is hot – send newsletters more frequently in the first two months after people sign up for your emails.
In the next 2 months, reduce the frequency to 2 a week or less, so as to not annoy people. If you still see people unsubscribing from your mailing lists, reduce the frequency even further.
If you provide SaaS-based or similar services with annual (or periodic) renewals, start increasing the frequency of your emails after 10 months or so, as the renewal date draws near.
Takeaway Tactics
The days of “spray and pray” marketing are long over. In the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, a lot of ideas on content, layout and frequency were discussed; give this case study a quick read and sign up here if you’d like video replays of the sessions delivered to your inbox.cas
If you don’t have time to do either, here are some quick tips:
• Create something easy to remember about your product/service.
• Infuse feelings in your messages.
• Tell great stories that can be shared.
• Give a hierarchal structure to your layout.
• The “rule of thumb” in white space is to have 40-60 pixels between elements.
Finally, segment your lists and customize and personalize your emails to keep your subscribers engaged. Retaining an existing customer (or subscriber) needs far less work than acquiring a new one. I’ll leave you with a quote from Diana Primeau, Director of Member Services at CNET: “I work in a world where it doesn’t matter how many subscribers we have. It's about more engagement.”
About The Author
Tracy Vides - Digital Content Strategist
Tracy is a content strategist and serial blogger who gives small businesses and entrepreneurs online marketing advice. Hit her up any time on Google+ for a chat. You can also find her on Twitter.
To get the maximum out of your marketing budget using Google Analytics, you need to know which strategies do and which don’t work. Once you know what does work, you can invest more time and money into it for a maximum Return On Investment.
DIY Content Based On Your Experiences
You may not be about to write the next New York Times bestseller anytime soon, but that does not stop you from sharing your thoughts and experiences with your audiences in a simple yet lucid fashion.
Since you and your target audience presumably share at least one common area of interest – your product category – share your expertise in the area via simple blog posts, tips via social media or even articles in magazines and journals in your niche. When it comes to content, the more heartfelt it is, the higher the likelihood that your users will connect with it. If writing is not your thing, try your hand at alternate platforms like video content or creating infographics. Devote at least an hour every day to putting your thoughts together. With time, you’ll get better at expressing yourself in words and content creation won’t seem like such a punishment.
Think you need some help before you venture into creating content by yourself? Check out this great listing of 75 resources that help you get started on the “write” track.
Invite Users to Share Their Content
Research has repeatedly proven that users trust the word of other users, even if they’re strangers, over the marketing communication that a brand may put out there for public consumption. This explains why a large majority of users seek out product or service reviews before making a purchase. Sites like Yelp and UrbanSpoon owe their very existence to user recommendations.
Use this fact to your advantage by inviting users to share their self-generated content with you. This does not have to be reviews alone. You could host a contest among your target audience asking them to send in their best pieces of art or an article or even a video or photograph around a topic relevant to your brand. The entries you receive can be published on your blog or social media driving conversation and engagement, while costing you absolutely nothing by way of content creation costs.
Participate in Trade Events as a Speaker
While any publicity is good publicity, it does not hurt you to seek out opportunities for great publicity for your brand and yourself, respectively. A good way to become well-known as well as well-liked is by participating in flagship industry events and making your own mark at the event.
Industry events get written about in category specific publications on a near real-time basis. This means that by merely speaking at an industry event or by presenting a paper, you automatically get talked about. Articles, blog posts, or other forms of content created by industry journalists that reference your talk, will carry a link back to your site or the particular piece of advice you shared. So not only do you get mentioned in the right forums, you also stand a chance to earn some free links back to your site!
Build A Content Marketing War Chest
The content that you curate, create and collect from users, family and friends can be used in multiple ways across the platforms where your brand operates. However, you’ll soon realize that once you begin down this path of sourcing awesome content that resonates with your brand and its users, you’ll end up with a ton of ideas. Keeping track and finding specific pieces from this treasure trove can become difficult and messy.
This is why you must invest in a task management and scheduling tool like Grexit, which lets your teams collaborate on concepts and campaigns, share notes, assign and delegate content creation, and get notifications, all from the convenience of their Gmail inbox. Use it in conjunction with Google Drive, which makes it simple for you to classify your content with labels based on factors like source, topic, recency, and so on, and also create and manage content calendars.
Build a content publishing plan with clear timelines using the scheduling function that these tools typically have. No need to take the trouble of going it all by your lonesome self; collaborate with your coworkers and make the entire process of content marketing an in-house project, not one that you need to throw large sums of money at.
Wrapping Up
Some of the most widely read corporate content comes from people who are not writers or content creators by profession – Sir Richard Branson, Bill Marriott, the Google corporate blog, to mention a few. So stop worrying so much about how much content marketing is going to cost you. All it will really cost you is some time and persistence to put together good content and the will to see it all through.
