Tips to make your emails stand out from the crowd

Email marketing can be a great way to generate leads, advertise new products and services, announce company updates, and keep your prospects interested.

But because email is such a popular marketing channel, there’s a high chance that your audience won’t even see your campaigns – we all get inundated with so many emails, it’s not surprising we become numb to the messages.

Personally, out of the 50-100 marketing emails that I receive daily, I’ll open around three to five of them, probably click a link on one or two, and delete the rest without a second glance. If others are following this same pattern, then how do you stand out? How do you make sure your email is the one people click on out of the 100 that appear in their inbox?  Here are some tips:

1. Curate Your Contact list

Who you send your emails to is just as important as what you’re sending them.

Trying to market to an uninterested party is never going to get great results. So tailoring your contact list a vital step to increase your engagement levels. Segment your database and make sure you’re sending your contacts content that interests them. You can do this by creating lists based on how you got your contact’s details; did they download a specific resource, fill out a form, or express interest in a product? Monitoring how you got their details will give you an idea of their interests, and indicate which types of communications you should send them.

2. Set your objective

Ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve by sending this campaign – are you trying to get across a specific message or encourage readers to complete an action?

Having a clear purpose behind the campaign before you begin will help you target the correct audience and include information to encourage readers to do what you want them to; whether that’s download a resource, visit your website, or get in touch.

3. Be clear and simple

Once you’ve identified your objective, make sure you’re communicating this clearly with your audience by including short, bold calls to action and a great design. Include powerful images and reinforce your company’s branding to build brand recognition.

4. Use video

Adding videos or GIFs to email campaigns is becoming a common practice. Including a bit of movement in your campaign helps your key messages stand out from a flood of other information.

One thing to watch with video is to make sure it’s carefully embedded and that the content makes sense in its own right. It’s also necessary to consider the size of your video, as embedding large videos into your emails could cause problems with delivery and load-speeds.

5. Craft a clear subject line

Your subject line is the most important aspect of your email. It needs to stand out and grab the readers’ attention instantly before they have time to delete. Some great tips to try are posing a question, creating a sense of urgency, adding an emoji, or even including a personalised field to generate intrigue.

Bear in mind that on smartphones and other small screens, subject lines often get cut off after the first couple of words. So include the quality messages at the beginning of your subject line and try to keep it short.

6. Personalise 

If you haven’t included a personalised subject line, you could consider adding personalisation into the body of your email campaign. ‘Hi Chloe’ is much more enticing than simply diving straight into the information. However, using personalisation in every campaign can cause it to lose its impact, so only use this tool when you have something really important to say.

7. TEST!

Testing your email multiple times is vital. Send it to every email client you can, and view it on as many screen sizes and browsers as possible; what looks great in Outlook on your desktop, might look horrendous on Gmail on your mobile. So, testing on different devices is essential.

When you’re testing your campaign, make sure you also check that all of the links work, your pictures display correctly, and it looks exactly as you’ve designed it – there’s no point spending time curating a clear design with effective calls to action if a portion of your readers can’t even view the email!

8. Optimise your send time

Knowing the best time to contact your subscribers can have a big impact on your emails’ open and engagement rates, but discovering the best time can be a process of trial and error. Send out your next few campaigns at different times – schedule one for a Tuesday at 10 am and another for a Saturday at 2 pm and see what happens. You may find that at certain times your open rate is incredibly low, whereas others receive great feedback.

Once you’ve identified the times when your audience is most active, simply schedule your campaigns strategically to engage people when they’re online.

9. Look at what the results are telling you

Finally, once you’ve mastered all these tips, the only way to keep improving the effectiveness of your email campaigns is to track the results. Use email analytics and the built-in statistics that are automatically generated from your campaign platform to monitor your open rate and click rate. Identify which content gets the most attention and which receives more unsubscribes. Then, continue to level up your content every time and repeat the techniques that receive the best response.

Creating effective email marketing campaigns isn’t easy.  If you need help in improving your ROI from email marketing, please do get in touch.

Chloe Derbyshire

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