Email marketing should be a vital part of just about any marketing campaign. However, some email marketing campaigns are overlooked due to bland content or because they are spammy. This is why a lot of marketing managers include various forms of content in their email marketing campaigns, such as video, as a way to better engage readers.
Let’s take a close look at what email marketing is, how it works, and why it works.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email is a popular form of communication. Around a decade ago, there were around 168 million emails sent every minute. That number has since increased, and for good reason. Email makes communication simple and almost instantaneous. For businesses, email marketing is a crucial strategy for reaching target audiences.
In the most basic form, email marketing consists of using email as a tool for delivering advertising messages. From brand updates to product promotions and more, email marketing gives marketing managers a simple way to communicate with customers on a mass level.
One of the top reasons that marketing managers love email marketing is because it is very flexible and versatile. You can include everything from simple text to video, animations, images, links, and more in an email. Most importantly, email marketing allows brands to send targeted messages. Think of radio and TV ads. You never know if your ad is going to reach your intended audience. With email marketing, the tables are turned. You can send your marketing messages to your contact list, easily allowing you to know you are reaching exactly who you want to reach.
Benefits of Email Marketing
The benefits of email marketing are quite easy to understand. They include:
- Low-cost marketing strategy
- Non-resource intensive
- Reach an engaged audience
- Deliver personalized, targeted messages
- Increase revenue
- Drive conversions and leads
- Build your brand
- Simple to get started
- Easy to measure
- Extremely shareable
- Reach a broader audience
- Instantaneous impact
- Great ROI
Elements of Effective Marketing Emails
An email marketing campaign can easily go wrong without including the right elements. Here’s a look at the elements that all of your email marketing campaigns should include and why to include them.
Subject Line
The subject line tends to have the most impact on whether the recipient will actually open the email. The sweet spot for a high response rate is to keep your subject line around 65 to 90 characters. It should be appealing, include an established brand name to lend credibility, and entice the reader to click the open button. Also, keep in mind that simply adding the word video to the subject line can boost open rates by 19% and increase click-through rates by 65%.
Body Copy
People don’t like reading long walls of text. This is why including visuals like a video, image or infographic can greatly improve the ROI of your email marketing campaigns. A good infographic helps the reader understand the email without having to read a wall of text. Plus, visuals make it easier and faster for the reader to comprehend what you want them to do, which is important because most people today are on the go and have little time to devote to a single email.
Call to Action
Your reader should always read the email without feeling confused as to what action you want them to take. This is why you should include a clear call to action that makes it simple for them to understand what you want them to do and how to do it.
Check out the images below for great examples of good call to actions in email marketing campaigns.
Device Optimization
In addition to the subject line, body copy, and call to action, you must make sure your email marketing campaigns are optimized for different devices, including PCs, smartphones and tablets.
Part of optimizing these emails for different devices includes:
- Going easy on images (most times, one to two images will be enough)
- Use a responsive template
- Be careful with words and characters (iPhones only display around 30 characters of an email subject line when being held vertically, and the “from” label is more prominent than the subject line)
- Break up text (no long walls of text)
- Use a very easy-to-see and clickable button as your call to action
Final Thoughts
Email marketing works! 93% of B2B marketers already use email as a channel for information distribution. 40% of them agree that email newsletters are the most critical element of their content marketing success. This year (2019), it is expected that brands will spend more than $350 million on email marketing. Also notable is that a whopping 50% of Americans check their emails at least 10 times a day and deem email as their preferred communication channel for receiving brand updates.
Are you ready to kick off an email marketing campaign that generates leads? If so, contact IGW today. We have a team of marketing gurus who can help you reach your target audience and drive conversions through email marketing.
