This is a guest post from Anna Konovalova at FlippingBook.
If you’re a marketer and need to create email marketing campaigns, then you know it’s a challenge to come up with new ideas and a fresh, engaging design every time, especially when you want to stand out with your email campaigns.
Each of us receives a number of emails every day: work, personal, advertisements, promos, and more, but how many of them actually catch our eye?
Read on to discover ways to make your email marketing campaigns outstanding: starting from subject lines and preheader text to compelling emails with interactivity, videos, and a mobile-friendly interface.
Craft an engaging subject line and preheader text.
What do people see before they open an email? The subject line and the preheader text. Because of this, first impressions really matter.
Subject lines play a very important role in making your email stand out in your client’s inbox. Keep these tips in mind to help make your subject lines both compelling and informative.
- Make your subject lines clear and short: The main task of a subject line is to indicate what an email is about. The reader should be able to understand your message right away from a quick glance at the subject line. Also, don’t make your subject line too long because it may be clipped on mobile devices.
- Add an element of intrigue: While it’s important to make your subject line clear, don’t forget to add a bit of mystery to engage your readers. This way, they’ll definitely want to open your email and learn more.
- Ask compelling questions: By posing a question that’s relevant to your clients or that addresses their pains and challenges, you’ll make them more interested to read your email and find what solutions you could offer them.
- Add emoji to your subject lines: Emoji are great for making your subject lines more expressive and grabbing your readers’ attention. They help create a more positive and personal approach to your email campaigns.
Learn about subject line formulas here.
Preheader texts are also essential for your email and deserve more careful consideration than they usually get.
In our modern digital age, with people always on the go, preheader texts are becoming more and more important because so many people are reading email on mobile devices.
Preheader text is a great way to give a short summary of your email, as well as invite your clients to open and read. Paired with short, compelling subject lines, these little snippets can help you be more creative and bring your audience on board.
Find out about the what, why, and how to use preheader text by watching this video.
Keep it short and sweet.
When your email is opened, the next step is to fulfill the promise you make in the subject line, and that’s what the body text is for.
The body of your email should be concise, informative, compelling, and actionable. And you don’t have much time to achieve all this because the attention span of the average reader is getting shorter and shorter.
In fact, emails with 75–100 words have the highest response rate, at 51%.
Source: Boomerang
So what can you do to make the most of the body copy of your email? Consider these quick tips.
- Create a hierarchy of information: Put the most important information in the first lines of your text and, if needed, go into a bit more detail later on.
- Make your text scannable: Use short paragraphs, headers, and bullet points to make your body copy clear and easy to read.
- Describe the value of your offer: Remember, the purpose of your email is to inform your clients and to get them to act (e.g. clicking through to learn more). Describe the juiciest part of your offer so they become engaged and are motivated to click your CTA.
- Address your clients’ pain: Knowing what keeps your audience awake at night allows you to understand what problems they need to solve. They’ll appreciate that you’re ready to answer their questions and offer them a real solution for the challenges they face.
Create an interactive experience.
After your email text is ready to shine, it’s time to add enticing interactive content.
Interactive content—GIFs, animations, responsive charts, infographics, surveys, quizzes, and polls—help you engage your readers a bit longer than usual and offer the chance for the readers to interact with your content (e.g., to click or tap on it).
Also, it’s a good way to stand out with your email content: according to Snap App, 88% of marketers agree that interactive content does differentiate them from the competition.
What’s more, you can make the reader experience with your email even more interactive by adding links and CTAs that lead to professional-looking digital publications with a nice page flip effect.
If you want to offer valuable content in your email marketing campaigns, then online publications could be just what you need.
Source: FlippingBook
You can add popup images, GIFs, links, and videos to your publications, making them more engaging, informative, and full of valuable knowledge.
This content is more likely to draw the eyes of your readers and raise their interest in your products and services.
Plus, digital publications are mobile-friendly, so your clients can easily open them on any device, be it desktop, tablet, or smartphone, and have the same great reading experience with crystal-clear text and images.
FlippingBook, software and cloud service for creating professional online documents, can help you with making online flipbooks, brochures, catalogs, magazines, and reports in a fast and easy way.
Add enticing videos.
If you’re looking to make your content more interactive, then you should definitely consider adding videos to your email marketing campaigns.
According to research, emails that include videos offer a 280% higher return than traditional emails. Videos are ideal for emails because they can communicate your message in a fast and engaging way.
Here are a few quick tips on how to use videos in emails.
- Keep it short: Make your videos short and compelling; videos that last around one minute are the best to interest your audience.
- Create a series of videos: One long video can get quite boring for your audience. Instead, you could make a series of short videos that’ll draw your clients’ attention, so they’ll be waiting for a new email from you to see the next video.
- Create different types of video content: Educational, problem-solving, and how-to videos in emails can be very useful and valuable for your audience. Your clients will feel that you really care about them.
- Use a static image with a play button: If you don’t want to embed video in your email, you can use a static image with a play button that leads to a YouTube, Wistia, or Vimeo video. With this approach, you can even track clicks and get statistics on your video.
Make your emails mobile-friendly.
Mobile clients accounted for 41.9% of email opens during Q1 2019, according to research by Emailmonday.
One more fact from that research: about 3 in 5 consumers check their email on the go (mobile), and 75% say they use their smartphones most often to check their emails.
This means that making your emails responsive and mobile-friendly is essential for your marketing campaign success.
Remember, your job as a marketer is not only to get your emails opened and read, but also to make sure your customers have a great experience, regardless of the device they’re using.
Here are the main tips on how to make your emails mobile-friendly.
- Use a single-column design: A single column makes your emails easy and comfortable to read on mobile devices. It also helps to simplify your design and highlight the important parts of the email.
- Create a distinctive call to action: Make your CTA large enough for your reader to be able to tap on it. A compelling CTA should be at least 44 x 44 pixels.
- Use small images: Speed is everything these days, so make sure that all the images in your email load quickly and don’t keep your readers waiting.
- Test your emails: Make sure to test your ready emails across different devices to see how they look. Nowadays, email marketing platforms allow you to check previews of your emails on desktops, tablets, and smartphones. You can also test how your emails look in different browsers and email clients.
Wrap up
Email campaigns are more than just marketing and sales tools.
They give you an amazing opportunity to enhance communication with your audience, engage prospects, and build up trust with your loyal audience.
Email is a space to talk to your audience in a more casual way than on your website. A human, personal approach will help you show that you care about your clients and that you’re open to dialog.
Create professional-looking emails that are comfortable to read on any device, interactive, and interesting, and you’re sure to stand out with your email campaigns.
Author’s bio:
Anna Konovalova is a Content Marketer and Translator at FlippingBook, software and cloud provider. When Anna isn’t writing, she enjoys going to the theater, listening to music, and finding inspiration in the world around her. You can find her on LinkedIn.