Optimize Your Campaigns With The 8 Essential Email Components

This is a guest post from Alyse Falk.

As a B2C professional, you know that email marketing is crucial in turning leads into customers.

In fact, many companies use email as their primary form of communication to reach their audience.

More than 360,000 marketers sent out 31.560 billion emails in 2019 alone. However, for your email to stand out, it must be strategically crafted with customers in mind.

Your subscribers expect highly personalized emails with eye-catching graphics to lend into their inboxes, which is why it’s essential to use each email component to its fullest.

In the world of continuously changing digital trends, it’s important that you’re providing your customers with the most effective email pieces.

Not particularly sure which email components to use? Read on to discover how to optimize your email campaign, including the very essential components your email campaign might be missing.

Email marketing benefits

Before we discuss the email components to utilize in your B2C campaign, let’s first dive deeper into the benefits of email marketing.

Proper email marketing boosts your credibility as a brand. Emails from unknown senders with questionable subject lines look unreliable, right? Wrong! On the contrary, when well-crafted, emails can add status, quality, and a pinch of credibility to your brand.
Emails are a great way to bring more visitors to your website. You can use your email marketing pieces to share useful content on your website.
Email marketing contributes to sales, and it continues to be the driving force of revenue generation. In fact, many customers buy products impulsively when they get an email featuring these products.
Email marketing helps optimize your time and budget. Developing a content marketing strategy doesn’t require big expenses. Plus, there’s a great deal of free online resources on email marketing.
Email as a medium doesn’t impact the way you run your campaign. Unlike other platforms, email doesn’t have any impact on how or when you reach your subscribers.

In order for email marketing to be beneficial, you need to make sure that your emails are actually delivered to users. Otherwise, even the most thoughtful strategies will be ineffective. So how do you optimize your email marketing campaign?

And which email components should be your top priority? Read on to discover the 8 essential email components to include in every email you send.

1. Subject line

Did you know that 47% of customers cite a subject line as the main reason they open emails? As it’s the first thing your subscribers will see, your subject line should be captivating yet direct enough for your email to be opened.

Also, your subject line must convey the value you have to offer. Add a hint of what’s in it for your customers. You can stay informative and direct while being creative.

Emojis prove to be quite effective in increasing open rates and user engagement. They’re great if you need to portray an emotion, and they do save some space for your message.

It’s useful to study your subscribers and segment the audience. For example, for some customers, emojis in a subject line make them want to click and see what’s inside the email.

Others could unsubscribe because of emojis, if they’re inappropriate for the messaging. The bottom line is that all of your subscribers are real people with their own likes and dislikes. Make sure you have a clear strategy in place for the different segments of your subscribers.

2. Greeting

The next email must-have component is a proper greeting. Many B2C email marketers overlook the importance of greeting their subscribers. Keep your greeting short and as personalized as possible.

It’s useful to add the “Dear” followed by the subscriber’s first name or friend/ music lover/ writer/ [your company name]’s family member, etc.

If your company’s tone of voice is more informal and you can afford to be funny, you can use more humorous greetings. For instance, The New York Review of Books uses “Dear Intellectual Dinosaur” to refer to their email subscribers. It’s a great example of a greeting that sounds both creative and flattering.

3. Only necessary information

It’s nice when your email offers additional information, but it’s best if you keep your email as short as possible. As many folks are dealing with overloaded email inboxes, it’s better to keep your message brief yet informative.

Did you notice that a phone number split with dashes is faster to recall than the same number without dashes? If you haven’t ever thought about it, try to do this experiment.

Find a random phone number in your contact list and jot it down on a piece of paper. Write two versions, one spit with dashes (like so 000-000-0000) and another one without dashes.

Now, try to memorize the number and see which version recalls better. Did you memorize the split number faster?

At this point, you’re probably wondering what phone numbers have to do with email marketing. Well, research suggests that people better memorize information split into smaller chunks.

Similarly to splitting a phone number into smaller groups, you can split your email content into smaller paragraphs, sentences, and words. This way, your subscribers are more likely to recall your message later on.

4. Personalization

Personalization is another essential component to include in every email you send. Personalization allows you to better target your audience and increase customer engagement.

Your subscribers want to feel like every email they receive was tailored specifically for them. Mentioning the subscriber’s name or account number is the most basic (but still effective) form of personalization.

Divide your audience into several segments based on their preferences and demographics. Regular evaluation will help you identify which content pieces work better for individual segments of your audience.

5. Visuals

Visual marketing is another essential component of any email campaign. Subscribers are more likely to open your email and complete the desired CTA if your email contains visuals.

There are multiple types of visuals that look relevant in emails.

Product images

Product images are extremely effective in email marketing. However, with so

many marketers using them in their email efforts, you’ll have to figure out the way for your images to stand out. Here’s a great example of how the Swiss shoe brand On uses imagery to showcase their products.
Source: Campaign Monitor

Videos.

Embedding videos into your emails can help you share longer messages without taking up too much space. You can add product videos, explainer videos, customer testimonials, and interviews into your emails.

Source: Campaign Monitor

GIFs.

GIFs have become extremely popular among the younger generation of online users. They’re great if you want to portray a certain emotion, showcase your product, target millennials, and Gen Z. Also, GIFs are perfect for grabbing attention and are simply fun to watch. HBO does a great job embedding GIFs to showcase their shows.

Source: https://i.gyazo.com/2cd54b863715cf3207913a8334af2b51.gif

6. Emotional appeal

While B2B marketers often focus on logos while appealing to their audience, B2C professionals rely more on pathos to persuade their customers. It’s important that every marketing email you send appeals to the emotions, desires, and feelings of your subscribers.

Source: Studio Binder

Focus your email content on the issues your customers truly care about. For example, you can highlight your partnership with a local nonprofit that provides food for those in need. Or you can put a greater emphasis on the sustainability of your production.

It’s important to show your subscribers that you have shared values and care about the same issues. It can be as little information as one sentence at the end of every email, or you can share full articles on how you reduce the carbon footprint to battle climate change. Either way, you’ll show your subscribers your compassion and desire to support a good cause.

7. Responsive design

Did you know that 63% of emails are now opened on mobile devices? Given this stat on mobile users, responsive design is a must for any B2C email campaign.

It’s crucial that you optimize your emails for all kinds of mobile devices. Your emails should work as good on smartphones, laptops, tablets, and ereaders as they do on regular computers.

Also, make sure that your subscribers don’t experience any issues scrolling down your email from different software. To be effective, your emails must open perfectly in various email apps, including Apple Mail, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and others.

If your campaign targets customers globally, it’s important to ensure your email design stays the same when accessed from different locations. You can use VPN in the USA or software for better testing purposes.

8. The unsubscribe link

No matter how sad it feels to let your subscribers go, you must provide them with the option to unsubscribe from your mailing list. Make it easy for them to unsubscribe and change email preferences by locating a visible link on the bottom of your email page.

Learn from your customers’ experiences. Express that you feel bad to let them go and ask how you can improve. You can collect feedback by adding an exit survey on the unsubscription confirmation page.

Once a few folks change their email preferences, take a look at their responses and implement some of their suggestions for the future.

Wrap up

As you can see, email marketing isn’t insurmountable if you know exactly what you’re doing.

When crafting your next email campaign, make sure to include all of the listed components and measure the results of your efforts by conducting regular evaluations to see what works best with your subscribers.

Now that you know about essential email components, it’s time to start sending those emails.

Alyse Falk is a freelance writer with experience in digital marketing, technologies, content marketing, marketing trends, and branding strategies. Alice also writes for several reputable sites where she shares her hints for creating content.