If you’re satisfied with your open rate but people aren’t converting or clicking over to your landing pages, your email CTAs could probably use some work.
Imagine your email campaign is a movie. Your subject line and preview text would be the trailer, your body copy the rising action, and your CTA the climax where everything finally comes together.
Just like a movie, the climax of your email should be interesting, creative, and attention-grabbing to inspire your readers.
In this post, we’ll go over the basics of creating an email CTA with some best practices, mistakes to avoid, and examples to get it right.
What are email calls to action and why are they important?
Your email CTAs tell your subscribers what you want them to do after reading your email. They link to places outside of your email campaign, such as a specific landing page.
Think of your goal for the email campaign. Do you want people to:
- RSVP to an event?
- Purchase a product?
- Read a blog post?
- Listen to a podcast?
- Watch a video?
- Donate?
Your CTA literally links your email campaign to the place where your subscribers will complete an action.
CTAs are relevant because they drive the ROI behind your email marketing. Thirty percent of marketers say that email has the highest ROI of all tactics. To make it work for your organization, you’ll need an effective CTA strategy to drive conversions and website traffic.
Which is better for email CTAs: links or buttons?
When you write email CTAs, you’ll have to decide if you want to use hyperlinks or buttons.
At Campaign Monitor, we’ve found that buttons deliver a 28% better click-through rate than traditional hyperlinks.
For starters, buttons are easier to spot than standard hyperlinks because buttons are usually designed with bright colors.
Plus, CTA buttons lend well to the idea that online readers scan—they don’t read every word on a page. Headings are essential for guiding scanning eyes down a page, and CTA buttons are like headings on steroids.
We’ve also found that fewer links aren’t always better. Sometimes, you’ll want to give subscribers a few options—remember that not every subscriber will be ready to take action right away.
Notice that, when links go up, clicks also go up:
Source: Campaign Monitor
Take each campaign into consideration. It’s a smart idea to use a single CTA button for your #1 goal and include a few hyperlinks throughout the body copy as extra choices.
8 best practices for email CTA buttons
Your email CTAs have a big job to do getting people to navigate out of your campaign. There’s a lot of pressure to get them exactly right. Follow these tips to make the most of every CTA in every email you send.
1. Choose the right colors in your email calls to action.
Color choice is critical with your CTAs—whether you use hyperlinks or buttons. Contrasting colors grab attention and let people know they can tap the button.
Nielsen Norman Group found that minimalism isn’t the best choice here. “Ghost buttons” that blend into the background color or image confuse readers. Here’s what a ghost button looks like. We found A LOT of them while researching this article.
Source: Gmail
That’s a ghost button.
Instead, choose a color that contrasts with your image or background. Look how Indiegogo uses a bright pink button to go with every link:
Source: Indiegogo
2. Make sure it’s easy to tap or click.
Keep in mind that over half of all emails are opened on mobile devices.
In many cases (14% to 52% depending on age group), a subscriber might first open an email on their phone but wait until they’re on a laptop to complete the action.
Your CTA button or link must be large and easy to tap with a thumb if someone is holding a phone in one hand.
Nike used a large CTA button in black, which stands out nicely against the white background. Note how it’s aligned to the left. That makes it easy for someone to tap with a thumb if they’re holding their phone with one hand.
Source: Nike
3. Don’t be vague in your email calls to action.
Subscribers need to feel confident with your CTA before they’ll feel comfortable enough to click.
Research has found that phrases like “get started” and “learn more” don’t work well because they’re too vague and serve as common clickbait button copy. “Get started” with what? Downloading a report? RSVPing to an event? Creating an account?
Instead, use clear action verbs in first-person that help subscribers visualize themselves completing an action and reaping the benefits. Phrases like “I want to save money now” or “reserve my seat” both build urgency, tout benefits, and give ownership.
UNICEF uses clear action verbs, a hint of first-person here:
Source: Gmail
4. Draw attention to your CTA button with whitespace and design.
When it comes to web content, people scan in different patterns—they don’t read every word.
And people consume email campaigns even more abruptly than other pieces of content like blog posts. As they scan, people look for key features that tell them when pieces of content are important such as:
- Bold words
- Headings
- Bulleted lists
You can make your CTAs stand out by surrounding them with plenty of whitespace. In the case of hyperlinks, place them either at the end of a sentence or—even better—on their own line.
Tailwind included a big CTA button at the bottom here with plenty of white space. The hyperlink towards the top of the email is on its own line in a blue color (an excellent choice for links).
Source: Gmail
Going back to that UNICEF example, do you notice anything interesting about the composition? It’s specially designed to help readers scan. There are an inverted pyramid and Z-shape to guide the subscriber’s eyes down the page:
Source: Gmail
5. Live up to the promise with your landing page.
There are few things more frustrating than clicking a CTA button only to be directed to a confusing landing page or—even worse—a landing page that isn’t at all what you expected.
A link or button is a promise. People expect certain things from you when they tap that button.
Like emails, landing pages should be easily scannable and contain concise copy. Think of them as an extension of your email campaign.
UNICEF’s landing page includes big CTA buttons for subscribers to choose a donation amount along with only 100% necessary content.
Source: UNICEF
6. Avoid friction words in your email calls to action.
Friction words put the burden on your subscribers to complete a task. They include words like
- RSVP
- Buy
- Download
- Register
Instead, use words that highlight the benefit of taking action. “Get your free report” works much better than “register here for your free report” and clearly explains the benefit to clicking the button without scaring the reader off with the labor- and time-intensive word “register.”
7. Stick with a single CTA per email.
Research has found that consumers don’t actually like having too many choices—it’s a phenomenon called the paradox of choice.
When people are confronted with dozens of different menu items, for example, they have trouble deciding. Even worse, they tend to feel unsatisfied with their choice—what if something else is better?
Including a few links is a solid idea to help elaborate on different points throughout your email. When it comes to CTA buttons, however, stick with one single goal and action.
Notice that, while this PayPal email has two email CTAs, they’re both calling for the same action:
Source: Gmail
8. Don’t send the same CTA to your entire list.
Segmented campaigns can drive 760% more revenue than generic emails simply because they’re more relevant. Think about it: It’s much easier to spark the interest of 10 people than 100.
You can segment your list based on unique demographics like age, location, or behavior and give them unique email CTAs. Some subscribers may respond better to “revamp your wardrobe now,” whereas others may prefer “save on your favorite styles.”
To nail down the perfect CTA for each audience, run A/B tests across different segments of your audience.
Source: Campaign Monitor
Wrap up
Email CTAs are your moneymakers. They draw your subscribers’ attention out of the inbox and onto landing pages or even out into the real world. Make sure to keep the following tips in mind:
- Don’t overburden your subscribers with too many choices.
- Avoid friction words that put effort on your subscribers.
- Use bright colors and surround your CTA button with whitespace.
- Make it easy to click or tap from a smartphone.
- Use actionable language and landing pages that live up to the promise.
Looking for more ways to level up your CTAs? Check out these 10 tips to improve your CTAs in email.
This is a guest post from Jim Huffman at GrowthHit.
Email marketing for lead nurturing is one of the most effective ways to generate more sales. This tactic lets you stay in contact with potential customers and provides the chance to get your message across on a personal level, without distraction.
The one-on-one conversation aspect is the reason email beats social by 40x for customer acquisition, delivering $38 ROI for every $1 spent. It’s also the reason you can use your mailing list to reduce your sales close time.
Keep reading to find out how to build an email lead nurture campaign that shortens the sales cycle and ultimately increases your revenue.
How long does it take to close?
To cut the time it takes for a customer to move through your pipeline, you need to get clear on your sales cycle. Namely, how long on average does it take for a lead to become a sale?
Once you know that, you can work out how often to send out content.
For example, if it takes six weeks for a customer to go from initial contact to completing a sale, you might decide to run a nurturing campaign that reaches out to them once a week for six weeks. If you want to reduce close time, you might try emailing twice a week for three weeks.
You can calculate your close time in two steps. As shown in this image by Geckoboard:
It’s a calculation typically used in B2B, but it works just as well with your B2C sales.
Now that you have a level of predictability in your sales forecasting, you can plot how to streamline the cycle through email nurturing.
How to shorten your average close time
When was the last time you bought something significant on impulse? By “significant,” we mean something fairly expensive—like a new coffee machine or a TV, for example. In other words, probably not an impulse buy.
These purchases are often made carefully and infrequently.
This is because the sales funnel takes time, as does nurturing customers. Most people don’t click on an ad and immediately buy what’s being advertised. It’s too risky. Most customers read reviews for the product, research the store, and search for cheaper options elsewhere.
These are known as friction points, and they exist at every stage of the customer journey. Below we’ve listed a collection of friction points:
- Awareness friction: long signup forms, slow loading pages, lengthy landing pages, and buffering videos may stop buyers from learning more about your product.
- Consideration friction: cost, trustworthiness, and competition can all stop people buying from you.
- Purchase friction: data security and checkout process are huge barriers at purchase. Can the buyer check out easily and are their details protected?
And there’s one more friction at play throughout: the subconscious.
As much as we like to believe we’re rational thinkers when it comes to purchasing, we’re often driven by emotion. If we have an emotional bond with a brand, we’re more likely to buy from them.
This is why big brands like Apple and Nike continue to invest so much (time and money) into building relationships through great experiences.
Addressing customer friction points and creating an emotional connection are key when shortening your close time. And email—a communication form unburdened by changing algorithms—is the best way to do it.
Building your email lead nurture campaign
1. Make signup forms simple.
To nurture a lead by email, you need them on your mailing list. And for that to happen, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to sign up.
The first thing you need to do is make your newsletter visible on your website. Toms does this well with a basic section on their homepage.
And with a pop-up that appears after you’ve browsed the site for a few moments.
Both forms are simple, asking only for an email address. For reasons that will become clear shortly, you might want to ask for a name too. But don’t overdo it. Asking for details like a customer’s address and zip code for a newsletter will scare them off. In fact, according to Marketing Sherpa, every field you add to an email form decreases signups by 11%.
Why we’ve chosen Toms specifically, though, is because of how they tempt people to sign up:
“10% off your first purchase.”
With so many brands fighting for attention, people need a reason to hand over their details. This gives them that reason. It’s also building that emotional connection and an incentive to buy.
2. Segment your audience.
For your email campaigns to work, you need to nurture buyers that match ideal customer personas. These are the people your products are aimed at in your marketing and those who are most likely to act on the content you send.
Segmenting your audience means the right people see the right content at the right time.
For example, if you sell sports watches for men and women, it makes sense to have emails focusing on men’s watches go out to male subscribers only and vice-versa.
If you’re unsure of your ideal customer personas, you can use Google Analytics and conduct customer surveys to find out who’s interacting with your content and better understand their needs.
3. Focus on value.
Nurturing is all about the soft sell—delivering value to remove friction and build relationships.
Avoid any kind of blatant selling early on. Instead, focus on getting the customer ready to buy.
For example, for new subscribers, you might send out an email that introduces your company and talks about how you give back to the community.
Another email might give them a peek behind the scenes to show the bond between staff. That can be followed up with a blog post about a product they’re interested in.
It all works to create an emotional bond that fosters trust.
4. Establish goals.
Every email in your lead nurture campaign should have a specific goal.
For example, you might send out an email that includes a CTA for a reader to check out your new blog post. The goal of that email would be to educate your leads.
Another might be to ask subscribers to download your limited-edition watch brochure with the goal of identifying high-value customers.
Setting goals keeps campaigns heading in the right direction—towards the sale.
5. Send out content based on your timeline.
Now it’s time to start your drip email campaign based on the close time you’ve set.
How often you send out content depends on how quickly you want to make sales. But always do it with nurturing in mind.
For example, let’s say you want to sell a watch in three weeks rather than six weeks. You might send two emails in the first week introducing your brand and what customers say about it.
In the second week, you might send out two emails educating customers about your products through blog posts and customer reviews. Once that nurturing is done, in the third week, you can follow up with a special discount on the watch.
6. Personalize and customize the journey.
Remember earlier when we mentioned asking for a name? This is so you can personalize your email campaigns.
The simple act of making an email personal works wonders for sales. Check out these statistics:
- Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. – Campaign Monitor
- Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates. – Experian
- 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement. – eConsultancy
- Segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue. – DMA
Customizing campaigns through Campaign Monitor’s automated journeys adds another level of personalization by showing customers content they want to see based on their actions.
Another example: say you send out an email featuring two watches, one high end and another at the budget end of your range.
The customer clicks through to the page of the budget watch but ignores the high-end watch. This tells you the type of watch the customer is interested in. Your follow-up content can be centered around that.
7. Measure and optimize.
As your campaigns run, you can use the data to see what works and where improvements can be made.
Run A/B tests to find out which emails perform best. Tweak subject lines, images, offers, and CTAs and measure the results.
There’s always room to improve. The more you experiment, the easier it will be to refine campaigns to improve ROI.
Wrap up
Reducing close time is all about establishing relationships with your customers. The quicker customers get to know and trust you, the sooner they’ll purchase and continue to purchase. Because, once that emotional bond is there, it becomes easier to turn nurtured customers into repeat buyers.
To get the most out of your lead nurturing campaigns, be sure you:
- Make it easy for potential customers to sign up to your mailing list.
- Segment your audience so that the right people are seeing the right content.
- Focus on value, not selling.
- Have a goal in place for each email.
- Use your desired close time to guide your content delivery.
- Use personalization and customization to deliver content that’s tailored to the individual.
- Continually test and improve your campaigns for better results.
Follow these steps and you’ll convert more leads in a shorter time, boosting revenue and creating an army of loyal fans.
Jim Huffman is the author of The Growth Marketer’s Playbook, the #1 new release on Amazon in marketing, and the CEO of GrowthHit, a growth marketing consultancy. Jim also serves as a growth mentor for Techstars, a startup accelerator. Jim has led growth at three different startups that went from idea to over $10M in sales and got featured by WSJ, TechCrunch or the TODAY Show.
This is a guest post from Marc Poirier at Acquisio.
The impact of a landing page on your email list can go one of two ways.
It can lead to a conversion and a new email subscriber or, as is the case for more than 70% of landing page visits, it can lead to a visitor to bounce and never come back.
If you want to get more leads in your sales funnel, you need to make sure your landing page is optimized for visitors.
There are obvious factors—such as customizing landing pages to specific subjects and using clear calls to action—but what really boosts your bottom line are more advanced techniques used to optimize landing pages.
Read on to discover what makes a landing page really convert, and how to make your email list grow.
Why you should collect email subscribers
The main aim of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads, subscribers, or customers. These conversion goals can include signing up for a newsletter, requesting a sales call, or downloading an ebook.
For the purposes of this post, our aim is to generate more email subscribers.
Email subscribers are invaluable. One case study from Practical Ecommerce showed how email generated more conversions than other channels they experimented with.
To convert landing page visitors into email subscribers, you must include the right ingredients.
First, your landing page goal should match the ad that got the visitor there in the first place. If you’re offering a free ebook download on your ad, but then it’s unclear how to access it on the landing page, your visitors are likely to bounce.
So make sure the messages on your ads and landing pages match. Stick to a single conversion goal and don’t muddy the waters.
Next, use a clear call to action. The easier you make it for them to hand over their email, the more likely they are to do so.
The design and visuals of your ad should reflect the landing page the visitor will be taken to. If the ad is dark blue, make your landing page dark blue. This helps to create a cohesive experience, showing the user they’re in the right place.
As you’ve probably guessed, optimizing landing page conversions isn’t a game of set-it-and-forget-it. It takes work and testing to maximize conversions over the long term.
These factors are the most basic ingredients to include in your landing page. To get your landing page to generate as many email subscribers as possible, you must optimize it using everything in your optimization toolkit.
Read on for some optimization best practices and tips to help you reach a double-digit conversion rate.
Use your customer’s language in your copy.
If your landing page isn’t using the language your customers are using, there’s a good chance it’s hurting your conversion rates.
Sometimes less is more. You don’t want to explain your entire business or product on a landing page—that’s what your website is for. You just want to convert your visitor based on a single goal.
Start by looking at data you already have from your Google Ads, analytics, and social media profiles. Which phrases, terminology, and keywords are your target audience using to find or describe products like yours?
This is the language of your customer, and you need to be injecting it into your landing page copy. Use it to show your customers that you truly understand them.
Creating copy this way will also help you optimize your customer personas and help you sound more like a human being. Nobody wants a sleazy sales speech on a landing page.
Speak to your customers as if you’re one of them, focus on key pain points, and cover all the basic landing page copy principles:
- Make the conversion goal of your ads the main focus
- List the offer’s benefits
- Touch on the customer’s pain point
Monitor your customer’s language on a regular basis. Use your findings and observations to experiment with headlines and the overall copy on your landing page.
Persistence is key. Your copy won’t be perfect the first time. Keep split testing and, eventually, you’ll find the language that resonates best with your audience.
Bonus tip: Experiment with long-form copy.
If you’re selling an expensive or complex product, long-form copy is your friend.
Long-form copy on landing pages can get up to 220% more leads than short-form copy. But this only applies for certain products. Why? Because you’ve taken the time to explain your product or offer in greater depth. The key to long-form copy is to make your content scannable. Break it up into easy-to-digest sections with subheadings.
Take this example from Ramit Sethi:
The conversion goal for this long-form landing page is a first name and an email address. But the email subscriber is then added to a funnel where Sethi tries to sell a thousand-dollar product. The effort from the first landing page is essentially laying the foundation of what’s to come in future emails.
Long-form content works. But you need to constantly test every element, from design to headlines and CTAs. Only then will you see if long-form copy is the right fit for your particular product, or if you’re better off having a shorter landing page.
Keep the important stuff above the fold.
“Above the fold” is a term that comes from the newspaper industry. It means you capture the reader’s attention before they unfold the paper.
The same principles apply to your landing page. It must provide important information above the fold, hooking them into reading further. Because chances are, if they aren’t hooked, they’ll bounce.
This is a perfect example from Fiverr. In the landing page above, their goal is to generate more email subscribers.
Their conversion goal is getting an email address, so that’s kept above the fold. Their copy, benefits, and social proof are all placed below the fold. It doesn’t mean these elements are less important, but generating email subscribers is the number-one priority.
The good news is that you can see how people are interacting and engaging with your landing pages on different devices.
By customizing above-the-fold content to each device, you can make sure your conversion goal remains the number-one priority on the landing page, no matter how your customer is viewing it.
You can do this with the following technique.
Use heat maps to monitor user behavior.
Heat map tools show you which elements visitors are viewing and where they’re clicking on your landing page. This shows you if customers are ignoring your CTA to subscribe. Or if they’re clicking on something that isn’t your conversion goal, like a social media link.
Heat maps are the closest you’ll get to seeing what your visitors are interested in.
Source: CrazyEgg
Heat maps come in many shapes and sizes. A scroll map will show you where a visitor has scrolled and can even pinpoint where they left your page.
Red and yellow mean people have stopped scrolling and spent more time on that section of the page. But blue and white mean visitors have either scrolled straight through that section, or left the page at that point.
Confetti maps show how every single visitor got to your page and where each of them have clicked.
The greatest heat map benefit is taking the guesswork out of how your landing pages are generating email subscribers. It also shows which areas are causing friction.
You might think that your call to action is in the best place or that every visitor is reading every word of your copy. But, until you know that for sure with a heat map, you should always try and learn from your customers’ behaviors and learn where you can improve.
Want to see how a heat map works before investing in the software yourself? CrazyEgg has an interactive demo that shows you what you can expect.
Break down commitment using breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs help you lead email subscribers into your marketing funnels using segmented conversion steps.
Why are these useful? Because not only will you generate a new email subscriber, but you’ll also be able to segment them based on their responses.
Normally, you ask for a visitor’s name, email, and maybe even a phone number from a traditional form. But what if you left that until last, and got to know them a bit first?
By doing this, not only can you get their email address, but you’ll also get to know more about their job role, company, and pain points along the way.
KlientBoost use breadcrumbs on their landing page when generating email subscribers. Instead of asking for an email address cold, they offer a PPC performance proposal.
Then, they ask about their goals and in which field they work:
Finally, the visitor will hand over their name, email address, website, and phone number to get their free proposal:
This helps break down the visual commitment into bite-sized chunks, instead of serving a single form with almost a dozen fields.
Not only will you get a new email subscriber, but you’ll gain useful information that will help you personalize follow-up emails.
Capture users when they’re about to leave.
Did you know the majority of people will visit a website and leave, without doing anything at all? According to Digishuffle, average bounce rates can range between 46.34% and 65.53%:
With those kinds of numbers, you should consider placing an exit popup on your page to boost your email conversions.
This particular optimization hack will only be activated when your visitor is about to leave the page. It acts as a last-ditch attempt at generating a conversion.
Ramit Sethi targeted me with an exit popup when I was on his page getting tips about long-form copy. Here was the offer:
Notice the compelling copy on the exit popup. Put as much effort into this as you do your landing page. Your goal is the same: getting a new subscriber.
Add social proof and use the power of FOMO.
People are buying your products using your services. Are you using these positives to your advantage?
Social proof is a way to show visitors on your landing page that you know what you’re doing, and that you do it well.
The best way to add social proof to your landing page is by using trust symbols and testimonials. Have you worked with a company and helped them achieve massive results? Ask them, at the very least, to use their brand on your landing page.
If you can get one, a testimonial is worth its weight in gold when it comes to social proof. A headshot is great, but getting a testimonial from a key decision-maker in the company will be a real score.
If you’ve been featured in a well-known publication, here’s your chance to showcase that, too:
Numbers also help boost social proof. If you’ve got a large number of subscribers, add that metric into your landing page copy. For example, “Join 10,000+ marketers receiving our free newsletter.”
If you haven’t been featured in Forbes magazine, don’t stress. Start with anything that paints your business in a positive light. If a review from Yelp or Google is all you’ve got, then add it.
Retarget visitors through paid media.
Did you know that you can specifically target people on Facebook by what landing page they’ve visited, and even when they visited it?
This is vital for two reasons. First, you know which product or service sparked their interest enough for them to visit your landing page. Secondly, they already know the name of your brand or business (even if they only visited for a short time.)
And, while they might not have handed over their email address on their first visit, you should still think of them as a warm lead.
The best way to retarget visitors on Facebook is to keep your CTA clear and only target what the visitor was interested in on their first visit. Your main goal is to get their email address, so make sure that’s reflected with a “Sign up” CTA button.
In order to retarget visitors on Facebook from a specific landing page, you’ll need to install the Facebook pixel.
Then, create a Facebook custom audience. It’s not a hard process, but here’s a step-by-step you can follow.
Pro tip: Exclude users who’ve already converted on your ad to save your ad budget. You can do this when you’re building your custom audience in your Facebook Ads Manager.
Bonus: advanced techniques to boost conversions
Sometimes, it’s the small details that lead to big wins. When it comes to converting your landing page visitors to email subscribers, this could be something as small as the color of your landing page button.
Here are two small changes you can make to create a big difference to your email conversion rates.
Technique #1: Personalize your CTA.
Izideo ran a case study to see if small changes in the CTA on a landing page made any difference. Their first test was to change the copy of this CTA button from “your” to “my,” and the results speak for themselves.
Source: Izideo
A small change in personalizing the CTA increased the number of visitors who signed up for a trial by 90%. So try to keep complex words out of your CTA copy. Keep it simple and make it personal.
Technique #2: A/B test everything.
With so many variables influencing the actions your visitors take, the only way to really know what works is to A/B test your elements.
And you need to be testing everything until you’re happy with your conversion rates.
Testing and tweaking your CTAs, your copy, and every other element on your landing page will make the difference between boosting your conversions or settling for an average rate.
Avoid these landing page mistakes.
You’ve nailed the landing page best practices and you’re testing new approaches and copy to boost conversions.
But what about the things that could be hurting your conversions?
Reference your landing pages against these two critical landing page mistakes. If you find you’re falling at these hurdles, then make sure you fix them ASAP.
Mistake #1: plastering your social links on your landing page.
Including social media links on your landing page is like having holes in a leaking boat. If a visitor comes to your landing page and then clicks a link to your Facebook page, it’s likely they’ll forget about your conversion goal and spend time browsing Facebook instead.
Leave social links off your landing pages. Remember, you want to focus on one action only. Don’t worry about trying to get them to like your Facebook page. You can use retargeting to serve them social content after they’ve opted in to your email list.
Mistake #2: neglecting the speed of your landing page.
If your landing page isn’t loading in two seconds, chances are you won’t be converting a new email subscriber.
That’s the time the average user expects a page to load fully before they give up, and they’re not the only ones that care. Google cares, too.
Last year, Google announced that it would start prioritizing and highlighting pages that give the user a faster experience. Check here to see how your landing page speed ranks according to Google.
Nail the landing page basics and optimize the rest.
One of the quickest ways to build a big email list from your landing page is by getting the basics right.
Having a single conversion goal and a strong CTA are basic elements you need to start generating email subscribers. Once you’ve done that, you should start to experiment with advanced conversion tools like heat maps, retargeting, and exit popups.
If you have the right elements in the right place, you’re on your way to building a solid list of email subscribers for your brand.
Marc Poirier is CEO at Acquisio, a programmatic PPC platform that uses AI to simplify campaign management. Campaign Monitor readers can read The Marketer’s Field Guide to Machine Learning for free.
Article first published in January 2015, updated June 2019
We’re pretty big fans of beautiful HTML emails over here at Campaign Monitor.
We recently compiled the top 97 top email marketing campaign examples from campaign monitor clients, we launched a free tool to help you create them, and we regularly write about how to structure them, code them, and optimize them for conversion.
However, one thing we don’t talk about as much are plain-text emails and how to use them to drive conversions.
That’s why, today, we wanted to share with you some best practices for sending plain-text emails that convert.
The importance of plain-text emails
Although they’re not quite as pretty, sending plain-text emails alongside your HTML email is quite important for a couple of reasons:
- Preferences – Some people prefer plain-text emails over their HTML counterparts and email clients like Gmail and Outlook do allow people to view the plain-text-only version quite easily.
- Email client support – While virtually all email clients these days support HTML email, new wearable devices like the Apple Watch are likely to default to plain-text emails due to their limited screen size, meaning the plain-text email could be making a comeback in the near future.
What is the difference between HTML emails and plain-text emails?
There are a few differences between HTML emails and plain-text emails that are worth noting.
The first difference is the most obvious, and that’s in how each type of email appears. Typically, plain-text emails are just that—emails typed out in a standard format with very few, if any, images videos, or GIFs. When plain-text emails do make use of these, they’re typically shared using a link within the text instead of being uploaded into the email itself.
Source: Gmail
An HTML email, however, makes use of coding to create visually appealing emails. These emails have GIFs, images, and videos often embedded directly into the email to help retain the reader’s attention, while company branding through logos and varying colors are used to make the email stand out from the crowd.
Source: Gmail
How do I convert HTML to plain text?
Converting HTML language to plain text is possible thanks to the many tools available online. Many email providers are including HTML-to-text email converters in their available tools.
One tool available is the xmlgrid.net online HTML to plain text converter. With this tool, users can upload an HTML document, or simply copy and paste a URL with HTML content in it into the first box, select the node they want to be converted, hit “Convert,” and the plain-text version is displayed in the bottom box.
In our test, we used the URL:
We entered this URL into the top box, then selected the “body” node from the list within the box.
Source: xmlgrid.net
Once we hit “Convert,” we were given the following plain text:
How do I include a plain-text version of HTML email?
As wonderful as HTML emails are, it’s considered an email best practice to include a plain-text copy, in case your subscriber’s email client has trouble loading the HTML version, for whatever reason. Many marketing tools, including Campaign Monitor, now make it easier than ever to send a plain-text copy of your HTML emails by automatically generating a plain-text copy.
How to send plain-text emails that convert
If you use an email marketing service like Campaign Monitor, then the tool will automatically create a plain-text version of your campaign and send it alongside the HTML version.
However, given the importance of these plain-text emails, it’s worth spending a little bit of time optimizing it to help ensure you get the maximum amount of conversions from your campaign.
So, on that note, here are several ways you can optimize your plain-text email to help increase readability and conversions.
Leverage whitespace to make it easily readable.
Leaving areas of open white space in between groups of copy helps increase readability and improve comprehension.
In fact, psychologists found that, when readers looked at web-based copy, white space and margins were more satisfying to read and caused them to slow down and examine the information more carefully
To demonstrate the impact, let’s look at an example of two plain text emails with and without proper use of whitespace.
Without whitespace:
With whitespace:
As you can see, breaking the email up with some extended whitespace makes it much more legible and helps prevent people from being overwhelmed and simply clicking away.
Create a hierarchy.
One of the biggest drawbacks of plain-text email is you can’t use common text formatting elements, like headers, in your email design.
However, even without those things at your disposal, it’s important to create an information hierarchy to help readers comprehend how the different elements in your email go together to form a complete story.
The best way to do this is using either capital letters or symbols to establish your headers.
To illustrate, here are two instances of the same email we’ve been using through this post, one with a defined header and one without.
Without a defined header:
With a defined header:
As you can see, by defining the header using some basic plain-text formatting tricks, you can still create a visual hierarchy that separates the various elements of the email and makes it easy to consume.
Highlight your main CTA.
We recently tested the effect of using CTA buttons in email campaigns and found that they increase conversion quite significantly.
However, buttons don’t increase conversions because people simply love clicking on them. They increase conversions because they stand out above the rest of the content and focus the user’s attention on the call to action.
Even though you can’t use fancy buttons in plain-text emails, you can still use other formatting tricks to make them stand out above other content and draw the reader’s attention.
Characters like the asterisk (*) or angled brackets (< >) can be used to surround CTAs and, when combined with a bit of extra whitespace, can help your CTA get noticed.
Without CTA formatting:
With CTA formatting
By adding angled brackets and a bit of extra whitespace, we were able to make the CTA stand out from the body text, while still maintaining the information hierarchy of the email. This means people still consume the email in the order intended (heading, body, CTA) but are much clearer on what the next step is.
Real-world examples of plain-text emails in action
Plain-text emails are still very relevant in today’s fast-paced world. In fact, many big businesses still make use of plain-text emails in their automated campaigns.
Microsoft 365 renewal email
Microsoft includes a nicely formatted plain-text email for their Office 365 users. In this email example, we see that the only real formatting included is the Microsoft logo and a blank sidebar to move the text over. Everything else is plain-text, and, instead of hyperlinking the text, they simply add in entire links within it for users to click on.
Source: Microsoft
Illinois Secretary of State license plate renewal confirmation email
The Illinois Secretary of State also makes use of plain-text emails. In this example, it’s a plain-text transactional email sent out to users who’ve opted to renew their license plates online, instead of visiting their local DMV.
Source: Illinois Secretary of State
Your Stay at Marriott summary email
Our final example is of a follow-up email sent after a recent visit to a Marriott hotel. There’s some form of text hierarchy used, and, instead of simply pasting links into the text, Marriott chose to hyperlink relevant anchor text.
Source: Marriott
Wrap Up
By implementing the three best practices outlined above, we were able to progressively transform a basic plain-text email that was almost impossible to read into a legible, compelling email campaign, complete with headers, CTAs, and more.
So, next time you’re creating and sending an email campaign, don’t just skip over the plain-text version. By implementing these three best practices, you can transform your plain-text email into a conversion machine.
Want to learn more about how Campaign Monitor helps users send plain-text versions of their HTML emails? Check out our helpful article on the subject.Want to improve your email marketing?
Article published in October 2014, updated June 2019
There’s a lot that goes into an effective email campaign. A lot. Knowing what you really need to do to make your emails convert better can seem murky at best.
You can structure your email for scanners, write copy that’s compelling, and create CTAs that are unique and awesome, but many of you will probably still experience a lack of conversion.
So what do you do? Following the principles of high-converting campaigns and how to optimize your emails before sending can set you on the path to better email conversion.
In this post, you’ll learn the three principles of optimizing email conversion for your campaigns. We’ll give you actionable tactics you can use to increase your conversion rates in your next email campaign.
Get more conversions with these 3 principles.
In our guide on How to Get Better Marketing Results With Beautiful Design, we laid out the three principles of beautiful design that supports email conversion.
- Your campaign should motivate a person to take action. Through the design and copy of your campaign, you should be giving the reader sufficient motivation to click through and take your conversion action.
- Your campaign should reduce anxiety toward taking the action. Through the design and copy of your campaign, you should be reducing any anxiety the reader may have towards clicking through and taking your conversion action.
- Your campaign should make it easy to convert. Through the design of your campaign, you should make it shockingly easy for readers to click through and take your conversion action.
These three principles form the basis of any successful email marketing campaign. By applying them to the design and development of your campaigns, you’ll see great conversion rates.
Apply these principles to increase conversions.
Now it’s time to put the principles into action. Let’s take a look at some examples of how others have done it before.
Step 1: Motivate your recipient to take action.
To motivate someone to click through your email campaign, you need to create a desire in them for your product or content.
According to consumer psychologist Adam Ferrier, desire is made up of two key elements: individual incentive and social norms.
The individual incentive is the idea that people are motivated to behave a certain way either to gain pleasure or to avoid pain. In marketing terms, desire to convert is created when people can see how your product or service will either please them or solve their problem (or potential problem).
With that said, humans are inherently social, and we’re driven to act in a way we believe would be considered “normal” in society. When deciding whether or not to act (in this case, to click through), we also consider things like how we’ll look if we perform this behavior. Our brain analyzes the social norms around this action, and whether people we consider influential are undertaking the same action.
So, in order to create a desire for your product, you actually need to satisfy both the individual incentive and social norm elements at the same time. You need to show people how your product will reduce pain or increase pleasure, and you need to reassure them that using your product is acceptable or encouraged by their peers.
Here are some examples of how you can motivate in your email campaign.
Use irresistible imagery.
Using beautiful and compelling imagery in your email campaigns can motivate by appealing to the pleasure side of someone’s individual incentive.
This is particularly important in visually driven businesses, like food and fashion, and Campaign Monitor customer The Restaurant understands this point.
In their email campaign for the launch of their winter menu, The Restaurant used high-quality images of their food to stir people’s appetite. This mouthwatering imagery creates a desire to eat, which motivates the viewer to convert. Imagery can also portray social incentives that might cause someone to feel like they’re missing out if they don’t buy the product.
Try it out.
When using images or screenshots of your product in your marketing content, use irresistible and compelling graphics or photos to increase individual incentive and drive people to click through to your email conversion.
Write benefit-focused copy.
Focusing your copy on the benefits of your product—rather than its features and options—helps people understand how your product can make their lives better and increases their individual incentive to convert.
Although this concept is fairly well-known, when you’re strapped for time, it’s easy to start writing about features, forgetting to write about how they actually meet the wants and needs of your audience.
O’Neill does a great job of showing how to avoid the pain someone might experience.
This header says, “Wet to dry—unreasonably fast,” hinting at the pain of being wet for too long. They focus on the benefit of their product instead of the feature. The feature is that the materials used in this product can make the aquatic activist dry quickly. The benefit: when you’re wet, you can get dry in an unbelievably short time.
Try it out.
If you’re stuck only thinking about the features of your product, try making two columns on a piece of paper, with features on the left and benefits on the right. Think of it as a translator, and focus on translating features into statements about benefits. This can be a guideline for you as you approach your email copy in the future.
Step 2: Reduce anxiety around taking the conversion action.
Reduce any potential anxiety toward taking an action.
In marketing, anxiety is essentially any feeling of discomfort or unease toward making a conversion.
Anxiety can be caused by any number of things, including:
- Concern that your offer isn’t worth their time and/or money
- Worry that your product or service isn’t the right choice for them
- Doubt that your product or service is reliable or can deliver what you claim
- Fear that purchasing your product is insecure
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to understand what their points of anxiety may be. Then take steps to reduce those anxieties.
Here are a few ideas to reduce your recipients’ anxiety in your email campaigns.
Show testimonials.
Featuring testimonials from happy customers in your campaigns is a great way to reduce any anxiety people may have toward your product.
However, it’s not enough to just include a small snippet from a customer about how great your product is. People don’t always trust that these snippets are genuine. Instead, include the customer’s name and photo to increase the credibility of the testimonial. More credibility creates more trust, ultimately relieving anxiety.
The email marketers at Freshbooks leverage a testimonial from a happy customer to help reduce anxiety around their new feature announcement.
Try it out.
Using testimonials in your email campaigns can help reduce anxiety people may have toward your product and help drive more conversions. And make sure your testimonial is trustworthy and includes the person’s name and photo to enhance credibility.
Showcase customer counts.
Showcasing customer counts and creating social proof in your campaigns can also help reduce anxiety toward conversion.
These metrics and statistics help reassure people that your product is secure and reliable. It shows how dependable your product is to do the task people need it to do. This goes back to the principle of consumers following social norms. They want to know that people like them are using the product and achieving their goals.
InVision uses customer metrics in their email marketing campaigns. By including the number of other designers using InVision, they create a sense of safety and security in the product that gives people the confidence to sign up and start using it.
Try it out.
If you have some impressive customer numbers, incorporate them into the design of your email campaigns to address people’s concerns and provide social proof. However, avoid showcasing customer counts if you don’t yet have an impressive number. Few people like to be the first to try something, and this form of negative social proof could actually lead to anxiety.
Step 3: Make your email conversion easy.
Make it as simple as possible for your recipient to take action.
According to consumer psychologist Adam Ferrier, increasing ease is one of the most effective ways to multiply people’s likelihood of taking your desired conversion action.
Ferrier cites a study where researchers compared how many chocolates a person consumed when the chocolates were placed on their desk, versus when they were placed just two meters away. They found that, when the chocolates were placed on the desk, people ate an astonishing five times more chocolates than when they were a couple of meters away.
This study highlights the importance of ease in getting people to convert. Even though consumers’ desires and anxieties toward eating chocolates were exactly the same, making the candies easy to access increased consumption five times over.
How can you make your email conversion shockingly simple for your subscribers? Here are a few ideas you can apply to your next campaign.
Use buttons that stand out.
Using a highly visible CTA button is one of the quickest and most effective ways to make it easy for people to convert.
When we tested replacing the call to action links with a large CTA button, we got a 22% increase in click-throughs.
Rip Curl does this well in their email campaign for a new GPS watch. The big “Shop Now” CTA button utilizes size and contrast to stand out from the rest of the email. By standing out, it ensures readers know exactly which step to take next.
Try it out.
Use a CTA button in your email marketing campaigns instead of just a text link. Make it stand out by choosing a color that pops against the background of your email. Before you send, circulate a test to a variety of people to see if the CTA is extremely clear.
Remove distracting elements.
Sometimes, making it easier to convert isn’t about adding new elements like buttons and images. Instead, it can be about taking things away.
Making their email conversion easy for subscribers of their newsletter, SitePoint uses a simplified design, with no extraneous images or design elements.
This lack of other design elements focuses the reader’s attention on the news stories in the email. This focus drives them to read the snippets, piquing their interest to read more of the article by clicking through.
Try it out.
Try removing extraneous elements from your campaigns to focus people’s attention on your key conversion actions. The added simplicity can make your CTAs stand out from the rest of the content and help funnel people into clicking them and converting.
Use conversion-centric design in email.
Email campaign optimization is about designing the content around a goal. When you set out with a goal in mind, your content will be geared more optimally to achieve results with engaging in text, imagery, and layouts.
The best way to receive conversions from email is to understand the components that garner engagement and, more specifically, how to drive users towards a profitable call to action.
Soló
Source: Really Good Emails
This email example showcases the time-sensitive nature of a deal. Oftentimes, driving an individual to a preferred action merely requires you to bring up a timeframe that creates a sense of urgency. If there’s a limited amount of time to take advantage of a promotion, it’s more likely that your subscriber will take action.
Even the image itself conveys that some time has passed and the reader may need to act fast. If you want the user to click through and engage, you need to let them know the opportunity won’t last forever.
Quickbooks
Source: Really Good Emails
Quickbooks also utilizes an email to express time sensitivity, albeit with a different aim. In this example, the person isn’t being offered a discount. Instead, they’re using the trial version of a product. The trial is about to expire, so the aim is to get them to sign up for the full version.
The email offers a simple presentation but highlights how the user has already been using the product. Talking about the concept of momentum brings to mind what the user has gained from the product. They’re already seeing its benefits and, what’s more, they’re learning to use it. With that knowledge, it’s likely they could get even more out of the product by signing up for the full version.
Source: Really Good Emails
This example from Basecamp proves that conversion-centric design isn’t always about flare. This email cuts straight to the point with text rather than flashy graphics. The minimalistic approach is even more pronounced than the previous examples, but the goal is clear.
Email campaign optimization and, specifically, click-through optimization is about giving a user an easy path to engagement. Basecamp’s email does that by providing multiple ways the reader can click through and listen to the podcast. Providing interesting snippets about what to expect doesn’t hurt either, and helps build more interest.
Reelgood
Source: Really Good Emails
Article first published January 2016, updated May 2019
When you send an email, you want subscribers to take action. You want them to sign up for your newsletter, shop on your site, download your latest white paper, register for a webinar, or any number of calls to action you may desire.
So how can you get more subscribers to take action? Plenty of businesses are creating awesome email campaigns, but some are struggling with conversion rates. Only 22% of businesses say they’re satisfied with conversion rates, according to Econsultancy.
To supercharge your conversion rates, you can pair your email campaigns with a landing page.
Read on to discover how email marketing and landing pages work together to deliver awesome results.
What is a landing page in marketing?
A landing page is a web page whose sole purpose is to move prospects down your sales funnel. It’s designed and optimized to convert interested prospects into buyers. One of the best ways to get visitors to your landing page is via email.
Source: Campaign Monitor
There’s no better combination of tools than a landing page and your email marketing platform to lead you to a successful and profitable marketing campaign.
While the traffic to your landing page can come from your email list, it can also come from other sources, such as:
- Social media page
- Website
- Lead magnet
In essence, a landing page is where you take visitors to your website in order for them to take action on your marketing goal.
How to optimize landing pages to increase conversions
Because of its importance in your funnel, it’s imperative that you know how to optimize your landing page for higher conversion rates. Here are a few tips to get you started:
Craft captivating headlines
What do a landing page and email marketing have in common?
Their success hinges on the headlines you use.
When it comes to creating a headline for your landing page, make sure it offers the same benefits as the source of traffic. Failure to do so will lead to confusion and prospects dropping off.
Build trust
Nothing inspires confidence more than the testimonials of satisfied customers. Including testimonials on your landing page is a great way to encourage prospects to take action.
Source: Greats
Another great way to build trust is by including your contact details in the footer of your landing page. When people know that they can easily reach you, it alleviates their fears that they may be dealing with a scammer.
Follow SEO best practices
While your main aim is to couple your landing page and email marketing campaign, it’s also advisable to optimize your landing page for SEO. The organic traffic it’ll draw will boost your results.
Implement practices such as researching and using the impactful keywords in the right places.
Employ FOMO
People don’t like missing out on a good deal. If that good deal will be around forever, they’ll take their time to grab it. This is why employing FOMO techniques on your landing page is a great idea if you want to increase conversions.
You can easily do this by running limited-time (or stock/slots) offers. You can also run time-sensitive discount offers. However you go about it, let your prospects know that, by not grabbing the opportunity you’re presenting them, they’re definitely missing out.
How a landing page and email marketing campaign work together
Here’s how it works. You create an effective email, like the one below from Le Mer. The goal of this email is to learn more about the story behind their Blue Heart moisturizing cream.
When a subscriber clicks on the call to action, which, in this case, is the white “Learn More” button, he or she is taken to the specific landing page below. This landing page highlights the company’s entire Blue Heart Collection.
Landing pages like this can help increase conversion rates. How? Let’s dig into the reasons landing pages are effective.
What makes landing pages so effective?
Not all landing pages convert the same. So what are some qualities that make an effective landing page?
Focused attention
When a subscriber clicks on an offer in an email and is taken to a landing page, he or she is focused on one task alone. That increases the likelihood of a subscriber following through with the action.
What happens if there isn’t a specific landing page for an email offer? Most likely, the subscriber is taken to the homepage and has to figure out how to take action.
Your homepage is also full of a dozen other links, tab, and images. All of these things can be distracting to this particular subscriber, who just wants to follow through with the action outlined in the email. That’s what makes landing pages so effective—they cut through the clutter. A subscriber is less likely to get sidetracked or confused because he or she arrives on a page that focuses on the offer from the email and allows him or her to take action.
Message match
A landing page provides continuity. Both the email campaign and the landing page should have similar text and design.
By looking at the email and the landing page, there’s no question that the two are connected. This streamlined approach makes it easy for the subscriber to take action.
By combining an email campaign with a landing page, you’re more likely to capture the lead.
How to create landing pages that integrate with Campaign Monitor
For Campaign Monitor users, it’s easy to combine the power of email marketing and landing pages. Campaign Monitor has integrations with several top-notch landing page tools, including Unbounce, Instapage, and Wishpond. These tools have premade templates, mobile-friendly options, and tools that make designing a landing page simple, even for those without a lot of technical experience.
Because these tools are integrated with Campaign Monitor, email addresses that are collected are automatically added to your contact list in your Campaign Monitor account. It’s a major perk, and it only takes a few minutes to set up.
Tips to create effective email and landing pages
There’s an art to creating emails and landing pages. It requires some attention to detail, but it’s a fairly easy process when you take these tips into consideration:
Matching message
We mentioned before that the message in the email and message on the landing page should match. In other words, if the email offers a 50% off coupon for any regularly priced item, the headline of the landing page should mention the same offer. Repetition is your friend here.
Matching look
The email and landing page should have a similar look. That means using the same color scheme, font, and overall design. When subscribers click on an email’s call to action and are taken to a matching landing page, they instantly know they’re in the right spot. It’s a visual cue that helps subscribers follow through with the action.
Simplicity
Don’t try to overcomplicate your landing page. You don’t need a mountain of text and bunch of stock photos. To stick to the basics, keep the text simple and use one image as a background image or use a product image.
Reinforce the decision
In both your email and the landing page, you should reinforce the subscriber’s decision to take action. If you’re encouraging a subscriber to try your software for 30 days, tell them why it’s a good idea. Explain the benefits or provide testimonials that prove your software is worthy of a trial. It could provide the necessary push a subscriber needs to convert.
One call to action
Your landing page should have one call to action. It might be tempting to add an extra one to drive traffic to your homepage or blog, but now isn’t the time. The whole point of landing pages is to keep subscribers focused on one task; so don’t introduce additional options now.
The call to action should be clear. Create a call-to-action button that’s a different color from the rest of the landing page. You want it to stand out.
Keep forms short
Whether subscribers are claiming a deal or signing up for your email list, they’ll likely have to fill out a form. You can customize this form to collect any kind of information, but we suggest keeping the form as short as possible.
Emails and landing pages work well together because they streamline a process, you don’t want to hinder your efficiency now with a lengthy form. A form with three fields has a conversion rate of 25%. That rate decreases as more fields are added, according to Unbounce.
Test your landing pages
Just as we suggest testing your emails to maximize your success, we suggest the same with landing pages.
Fortunately, testing is easy. You can change certain elements of your landing page and see which image, text, or call to action resonates best with your audience.
Wrap up
Email campaigns and landing pages create the perfect one-two punch for effective digital marketing. Increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by using landing pages today.
Remember, not all landing pages convert the same. To get the most out of yours, follow landing page best practices to optimize your landing page for higher conversions. And make sure to use the dynamic duo of a landing page and email marketing platform to reach your goals faster.
For inspiration on your next landing page design, check out our article entitled “12 Best Landing Page Designs of 2018.” Not only will you get design inspiration, but you’ll get more tips on how to master this powerful marketing tool.
Article first published June 2015, updated May 2019
If you’re like most marketers, you rely on email marketing to drive results for your business.
One of the most frequent campaigns you probably send is the marketing offer email to inform your subscribers of new products, special promotions, exclusive discounts, etc.
These campaigns are great, as they directly drive sales and revenue for your business.
But do you know what elements to include in those emails to get people to click through?
Read on to learn the 5 key elements of a high-converting marketing offer email and see some examples from our customer email gallery of marketing offer campaigns that got it right.
What is a marketing offer email?
A marketing offer email is essentially any campaign a marketer like you sends to drive sales.
This can take a number of different forms, including:
Essentially, any campaign created with the primary goal of increasing sales of your products or services can be classified as a marketing offer email.
Can you make money with email marketing?
Having said that, you’re probably wondering if you can really make money with email marketing.
The simple answer is yes.
“The money is in the list” isn’t just an empty statement; it’s a reality many successful email marketers live. To help convince you, consider the following statistics.
Email marketing has an ROI of 4400%
ROIs of up to 4400% make email one of the best channels to use if you want to run profitable marketing campaigns. Email marketing offers outperform newer marketing channels like social media. The reasons for this are simple:
- Email has more active users than any social media platform
- A person’s inbox is personal, meaning people place higher value on what comes into their inboxes than what they see in their social media feeds
Email affords advanced segmentation and personalization
According to Campaign Monitor, marketers who run segmented campaigns have noted as much as 760% increase in revenue. People don’t want to be treated like a number in your database. They want to be addressed as the individuals they are. And that’s exactly what list segmentation allows you to do. The result is better conversions and more profits.
Source: Campaign Monitor
People prefer to receive promotional offers on email
A report by MarketingSherpa revealed that 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email. Only 17% said they preferred to get promotional content via social media. This proves that the money truly is in the list.
It also gives us a definitive answer to our question: Yes, you can make money with email marketing.
The 5 key elements you should include in your marketing offer emails
Given Campaign Monitor is an email marketing service, we see a lot of campaigns come through our system. Over 1 billion every month, in fact.
While each marketing offer email will be different, these are some common elements in the most successful ones.
1. Value proposition
In a marketing offer email, the value proposition is a short statement that concisely explains the benefits you get from taking the offer. A good value proposition explains to the reader what the offer is and why they should care about it and take action.
As an example, take a look at the value proposition from the announcement email of our drag-and-drop email builder:
As you can see, the email contains a prominent value proposition at the top that reads “create beautiful emails in minutes.”
This value proposition succeeds because it’s clear and simple, and focuses on the benefits for the reader. It tells them exactly what the product does (creates emails) and the benefits they’ll get from using it (beautiful email campaigns in just minutes).
So, when creating your next marketing offer email, make sure to include a value proposition that clearly outlines what you’re offering the reader and the benefits it provides them.
2. Images & visuals
Research shows that the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, so it’s critical to include images in your marketing offer campaigns to help get your message across.
A great example is this email from Campaign Monitor customer Rip Curl, who used email to launch their new GPS watch.
Rip Curl uses high-quality images of the watch throughout the campaign, ensuring that their message (we’ve launched a new watch) was received by recipients, even if they didn’t read the text.
When creating your next marketing offer email, make sure to include high-quality images of the products or services you are offering. This will help get your key messages across, even if people only skim the email and don’t properly read the text.
3. Benefit-focused copy
In order to get people to click through from your marketing offer email, your copy must make it clear to them what the benefit of doing so is.
One of our favorite ways to do this is by using a copywriting formula, such as the BAB technique. These formulas are great because they provide a framework for writing email copy that almost forces you to present your offer in the context of how it’ll benefit the reader.
To help illustrate, consider these two email campaigns promoting Campaign Monitor. One doesn’t use the BAB formula and focuses on features, and one uses the BAB formula to focus on benefits.
Without using the BAB technique
Using the BAB formula
In the first email (without BAB), the copy is largely focused on the product features and support and does little to speak to the pain points and desires of the target audience.
The second email, however, is completely focused on the reader. It speaks directly to their pain points and desires and positions the offer (in this case, a free Campaign Monitor account) as the bridge between their painful world and their desired world.
So, when you’re creating your next marketing offer email, make sure to focus your copy on the benefits your reader will get from using whatever product or service you’re offering them. You can use the BAB copywriting technique to help with this, but there are also others, such as the PAS formula and 4P’s technique, which are equally as effective.
4. Social proof
When you present someone with an offer, like a new product you’ve just launched, for example, your readers will have some natural hesitation and anxiety towards it.
This can be caused by any number of things, including:
- Concern that your offer isn’t worth their time and/or money,
- Worry that your product or service isn’t the right choice for them,
- Doubt that your product or service is reliable or can deliver what you claim it can.
So, in order to get people to click through from your marketing offer email, you need to take steps to reduce that anxiety.
A great way to do this is by including social proof elements, such as testimonials, in your campaigns.
When creating your next marketing offer campaign, try to include elements of social proof, like testimonials, customer numbers, star ratings, etc. to reduce anxiety and reassure readers that what you’re offering them is high quality and worth their time.
5. A prominent call-to-action button
When it comes to creating a high-converting marketing offer email, the final piece of the puzzle is using a prominent call-to-action button.
This is important because buttons make it clear to the reader what the next step is and encourage them to click through.
In fact, when we recently tested using a button in our email marketing campaigns (as opposed to just using linked text) we increased our click-through rate by 28%.
This is because buttons have a number of unique attributes linked text doesn’t, including:
- Size – Often, a button will be much larger in size than a linked piece of text, catching the reader’s eye.
- Design – Buttons often have design elements that links don’t, such as shadows, gradients, and other effects. This can make them “pop” off the page and stand out to readers.
- Color – Often, buttons will have a different color from the background and text, and this contrast draws the eye and makes the reader notice them more.
So, when you’re creating your next marketing offer email, be sure to include a prominent call-to-action button that stands out and get noticed. It’ll help ensure your readers know exactly what the next step you want them to take is and make it super simple for them to do so.
Best practices for promotional emails
Now that you know the five elements that make for a successful promotional email, let’s take a look at the best practices that’ll make your email marketing offers bring in results.
Segmentation is key
Before sending out your email marketing offer, always make sure to properly segment your list. This will allow you to send targeted promotions to those who have already shown interest in your offer, resulting in higher conversion rates. Sending your promotion to everyone on your list will not only result in a poor performing campaign, but could also lead to some of your subscribers unsubscribing. Worse still, they may fail to engage with your emails.
Let readers know who you are
Unfortunately, many senders neglect to be clear about who they are in the “From” field.
Make sure to include your name and logo in every promotional email you send. This will let your readers know who you are and prevent you from being ignored.
Nail the subject line
The subject line is a critical element in every email, but more so when it comes to promotional emails. Considering that 47% of email opens are influenced by the subject line, you definitely have to invest time and effort in crafting the perfect subject line.
So how do you ensure that your subject line converts?
Here are a few tips:
- Avoid overly promotional words
- Highlight a benefit
- Personalize it
Use FOMO to your advantage
People don’t like feeling left out on a bargain. It’s called the fear of missing out (FOMO). Use FOMO to your advantage when running email marketing offers. This will create a sense of urgency that’ll drive your customers to react faster to your offer.
You can achieve this by creating an offer that is:
- Exclusive
- Time sensitive
- Limited
Source: Campaign Monitor
Split test
You’ve designed an award-winning email, nailed the subject line, and prayed to the marketing gods for success. Time to send the email, right?
Not yet.
You still need to test its effectiveness with a small segment of your target audience before sending it to the rest of your intended audience. Even if you’re happy with it, you’ll need to have it vetted by those who matter the most: your customers.
How do you go about testing your email?
Create another version of your email with some slight differences and see which will perform best. That’s the short version. For more insight into how to split test your email campaigns, check out this post.
Wrap up
The marketing offer email is one the most important email campaigns marketers can send. It directly drives sales and revenue and helps you achieve your goals and KPIs.
So, next time you are creating a marketing offer email campaign, ensure it has the 5 key elements:
- A killer value proposition
- High-quality images and visuals
- Benefit-focused copy
- Elements of social proof
- A prominent call to action
By doing so, you’re ensuring that you’re getting the best results possible from your email marketing campaign. For more tips on running successful promotional email marketing campaigns, check out this guide we created to help marketers run better email campaigns.
Published June 2015, updated May 2019
Do you send an email newsletter to help drive sales and revenue for your business?
You’re not alone. In fact, according to our own research, email newsletters are still one of the most popular types of email campaigns marketers send.
But do you know the different elements to include in your newsletter to get the best results? If not, you could be missing out on valuable clicks and sales.
Read on to learn six key elements to include in your newsletter to help increase conversions and drive more sales and revenue.
How do I make a good email newsletter?
An email newsletter is a regularly distributed email campaign that’s generally about one main topic of interest.
Our own monthly newsletter is an example of this:
It’s sent on a regular basis (every month) and contains links to a number of articles all about a common topic of interest: email marketing.
6 tips for creating a high-converting email newsletter
While every email newsletter is different, there are a few ways you can improve your own newsletter to help increase the amount of click-throughs you receive.
1. Use a familiar “From” name
The “From” name (along with the subject line) is one of the few things marketers have to leverage to get people to open their email newsletters.
The key to success here is to use a “From” name your subscribers will recognize.
For instance, if you were to sign up for our email newsletter, would you expect to receive emails from Campaign Monitor or from Aaron Beashel? Given that you’ve signed up for these emails from the Campaign Monitor website, chances are it’s the former.
Campaign Monitor customer SitePoint does this well in their daily emails newsletter titled “Versioning.”
This popular daily newsletter contains links to the best content on web design and development from around the Internet and uses the “From” name “Versioning’” to help people instantly recognize the newsletter when it hits their inbox.
So, when you’re creating your next email newsletter, make sure to use a “From” name that your subscribers will recognize and look forward to seeing in their inbox.
2. Break your newsletter into chunks
Research has shown that people don’t read your emails campaigns left to right like a book, but, instead, skim over them looking for things of interest.
Therefore, writing long, text-heavy email newsletters isn’t the best approach.
Instead, you need to break your email newsletter down into easily consumable chunks of information.
To illustrate, take a look at InVision’s weekly email newsletter:
As you can see, InVision’s newsletter utilizes card-based design principles to present each piece of content on separate “cards.”
This breaks down a lot of information (their email contains 10 different stories) into easily consumable chunks that people can skim over to find stories of interest.
So, when you’re creating your next email newsletter, rather than overload your readers with paragraphs and paragraphs of text, break it down into easily consumable chunks of information that your readers can quickly scan to find content that interests them.
This will help draw them in and increase the chance they’ll click through to your website.
3. Use segmentation and dynamic content to personalize your newsletters
Rather than sending the same content to every one of your subscribers, you can segment your list and use features like dynamic content to show relevant stories and offers to each individual subscriber.
This ensures the content of their campaign is relevant and increases the chances that subscribers click through to your website and make a purchase.
Next time you’re creating your email newsletter, think about the content and its level of relevance to different people on your list, and try using features like Dynamic Content to only show the right stories and offers to the right people.
4. Add compelling images & visuals for each piece of content
Research shows that the average time spent reading a newsletter after opening it is only 51 seconds.
Given this short attention span, and the fact that the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, using compelling images and visuals in your email newsletters can be an effective way to appeal to your readers and get them to click through.
BuzzFeed does a great job of this with their weekly Food newsletter:
As you can see, they accompany every story in their email newsletter with a high-quality visual that gets people excited about the recipes and what they can cook up.
When creating your next email newsletter, make sure to include high-quality images of the products or services you offer. This will help get your key messages across, even if people only skim the email and don’t read all the text.
5. Include benefit-focused headings and body copy for each content piece
In order to get people to click through from your newsletter, you need to tell them exactly what benefit they’re going to get from doing so.
The heading and body copy that accompanies each content piece in your email newsletter is the perfect place to do this.
We focus heavily on this in our own monthly email newsletter, which includes content from our blog and guides.
Each content piece we include in the newsletter is supported by a heading and body copy that informs the reader what they’ll learn from clicking through and reading the piece, and effectively increases their motivation to do so.
Next time you’re crafting an email newsletter for your organization, make sure every piece of content you include has a benefit-focused heading and body copy to help motivate your subscribers to click through.
6. Add a prominent call-to-action button for each content piece
In order to ensure you get the maximum number of click-throughs, it’s important to include a prominent call to action for every content piece you include in your email newsletter.
You can do this using either a text link or a button. However, when we recently tested using a button in our email marketing campaigns (as opposed to a text link), we increased our click-through rate by 28%
This is because buttons have a number of unique attributes text links don’t, including:
- Size – Often a button will be larger in size than a linked piece of text, catching the reader’s eye
- Design – Buttons often have design elements that links don’t, such as shadows, gradients, and other effects. This can make them “pop” off the page and stand out to readers
- Color – Often, buttons will have a different color to the background and text, and this contrast draws the eye and makes the reader notice them more
Email experts Litmus do a great job of this in their email newsletter:
Each piece of content they include in their email newsletter contains a prominent call to action button that contrasts against the background color of that particular section to help it stand out and get noticed.
So, when you’re creating your next email newsletter, make sure to include a prominent call-to-action button that stands out and gets noticed. It’ll help ensure your readers know exactly what the next step you want them to take is, and make it super simple for them to do so.
Bonus tips for 2019
When you’re looking for email newsletter designs to increase conversion and loyalty, the small touches matter. It’s also important to stay up to date on the latest developments in the industry. Email marketing is such a fast-paced field, new best practices develop each year.
This section provides some additional guidance on strategies you can use for newsletter optimization. For an ROI-based conversion newsletter, there are many elements you can utilize to strengthen the content and increase the change of facilitating engagement.
1. Social proof can help you gain user trust
Even with an emphasis on creativity and informational content, newsletters are still promotional content in most regards. Due to this, your readers may be skeptical about what they’re reading. If you want to give them something they can trust, think about social proof.
Social proof is anything that demonstrates the quality of your product or service. It can also reaffirm the claims you make about your own brand. Social proof can be useful for adding credibility to your work and showing a sense of impartiality. Check out the example below, which highlights subscriber numbers.
Source: Campaign Monitor
A conversion newsletter can benefit hugely from these figures. Social proof can also come in the form of feedback, user reviews, success stories, and testimonials.
Any content like this could be used to build trust between your brand and your readers. If they see your brand has helped others, they’re more likely to believe it could help them too.
2. Content curation builds authority
Curation has gone by various definitions throughout the years. However, for the purpose of this entry, it could be considered as the process of gathering information from a variety of sources. Ever see those detailed reports with statistics from dozens of authors? Or those infographics that provide tons of insight on a particular topic? That’s curation.
This example shows how SparkToro turned an entire section of their site into a curation center. The top tweets from online marketers are mixed together, pulling relevant information from a variety of sources. It’s diverse, but focused. There’s variety, but also consistency.
3. Build your content around the CTA
At first glance, you may think this advice is backward. And, according to some marketers, it is. We’ve been taught the importance of content to such a degree that we put it as the centerpiece and focus everything else around it as a supplementary effort.
This isn’t to say that, in 2019, body text or even subject lines aren’t important. They are. However, newsletters are like any other piece of content. The CTA is the element that can really drive up conversions.
Source: Really Good Emails
When you’re focusing on email newsletter design to increase conversion and loyalty, everything from the title to the color scheme can be integrated with the CTA, as it is above. By increasing the impact of the call to action, you could also improve the engagement it receives.
Wrap up
Email newsletters are one of the quickest and easiest email campaigns you can send, and help keep your business top of mind, drive traffic to your website, and increase sales.
And, by following the six tips outlined in this post, you’ll ensure that you get the best results possible from each and every email newsletter you send.
If you want to learn about email newsletter design to increase conversion and loyalty, look at these great examples.