Elements of an Engaging Email
To ensure that your email campaign does not end up in your recipient’s deleted folder, your email must be engaging. There are five main elements to writing a successful and engaging email campaign.
1. Be Trustworthy
Develop and maintain a quality list of subscribers through a smart opt-in process. Choose the right opt-in type to build your list of opt-in email addresses. There are three categories of opt-ins:
Be consistent with your email marketing, as this will build trust with your recipients. To create and maintain email consistency, follow these suggestions:
2. Be Relevant
Know your audience and what they want from your emails. Have a clear understanding of what is truly relevant to your subscribers. If your emails are not relevant, your subscribers will opt-out. The email content has to be compelling and follow the subscriber’s needs and behavior. The main point of being relevant is sending the right email content to the right person at the right time.
Segment your list by knowing who the subscribers are (demographic attributes) and what the subscribers have done (past behaviors and transactions). Then target your audience by sending triggered emails and segmented campaigns (using dynamic content & personalization techniques) based on the subscribers’ behavior.
Email content is important to keeping your marketing relevant. The content must be likeable, personalized, helpful, educational, entertaining, and timely. The content of an email to a customer should do at least one of four things: solve a problem, save them money, make them smarter, or entertain them.
3. Be Conversational
An email should flow in a logical fashion to create engaging and personalized conversations. Emails need to evolve from not just campaigns, but to conversations. The content should stimulate a dialogue that’s free-flowing and should foster a two-way conversation. This means the email should not just “talk” to the recipient; it should give the recipient an opportunity to respond.
4. Be Strategic
To achieve strategic value in email marketing, you must use better metric systems. Appropriate metrics help to improve what you are sending to your recipients, when you are sending it, and the measure of the effectiveness and worth of your marketing tactics. Always be willing to make adjustments in your email marketing tactics accordingly.
The most common email metrics are:
5. Be Consistent Across Channels
Make sure to pay attention to consumer behavior across all channels to create a single, integrated, overall view of the consumer. Then manage and personalize the email conversations with consumers across all channels. To create a relevant interaction with a consumer over every channel, you need to understand that consumer’s behavior across all channels. To do this, you need a single, cross-channel view of the consumer. Emails and different marketing channels (website, Facebook, Twitter, direct mail, etc.) must work together to coordinate the customer’s experience. You need to verify that your customer’s experience is consistent and progressive.
1. Be Trustworthy
Develop and maintain a quality list of subscribers through a smart opt-in process. Choose the right opt-in type to build your list of opt-in email addresses. There are three categories of opt-ins:
- Single opt-in—subscriber enters email address and other information, and is then immediately subscribed to receive the next email campaign.
- Single opt-in with a ‘Welcome’ or ‘Thank You’ email—subscriber enters information and an immediate auto-response email thanks and welcomes the subscriber, including a message on what to expect in future emails.
- Confirmed or double opt-in—subscriber enters information and the post-subscribe thank you page will inform the subscriber to look for an additional email. Then the subscriber will need to confirm the subscription upon receiving the email.
Be consistent with your email marketing, as this will build trust with your recipients. To create and maintain email consistency, follow these suggestions:
- Timing—send emails at the same times and on the same days of the week
- Frequency—send the same number of emails every month
- Content—keep the types of content consistent
- Brand—send emails that usually look similar
- Naming & Subject Lines—use consistent verbiage so that the email “acts” similar when hitting the inbox
2. Be Relevant
Know your audience and what they want from your emails. Have a clear understanding of what is truly relevant to your subscribers. If your emails are not relevant, your subscribers will opt-out. The email content has to be compelling and follow the subscriber’s needs and behavior. The main point of being relevant is sending the right email content to the right person at the right time.
- Talk to the right people
- Say the right things
- Always improve
Segment your list by knowing who the subscribers are (demographic attributes) and what the subscribers have done (past behaviors and transactions). Then target your audience by sending triggered emails and segmented campaigns (using dynamic content & personalization techniques) based on the subscribers’ behavior.
Email content is important to keeping your marketing relevant. The content must be likeable, personalized, helpful, educational, entertaining, and timely. The content of an email to a customer should do at least one of four things: solve a problem, save them money, make them smarter, or entertain them.
3. Be Conversational
An email should flow in a logical fashion to create engaging and personalized conversations. Emails need to evolve from not just campaigns, but to conversations. The content should stimulate a dialogue that’s free-flowing and should foster a two-way conversation. This means the email should not just “talk” to the recipient; it should give the recipient an opportunity to respond.
- Provide content relevant to a consumer’s interests
- Adjust the content based on how the consumer responds
- Use behavioral filters to target the audience
- Trigger messages and adjustments based on behaviors
- Send an email that tells a story
- Limit email frequency to control the number of emails any one recipient will receive
4. Be Strategic
To achieve strategic value in email marketing, you must use better metric systems. Appropriate metrics help to improve what you are sending to your recipients, when you are sending it, and the measure of the effectiveness and worth of your marketing tactics. Always be willing to make adjustments in your email marketing tactics accordingly.
The most common email metrics are:
- Sent—number of emails that are moved through the sending mail server
- Delivered—number of emails that were sent and not rejected by a receiving server
- Bounced—number of contacts who were sent a message that bounced (hard or soft bounces)
- Opens/Open Rate—how many recipients opened (viewed) the email
- Clicks/Click Rate/Click to Open Rate—number of contacts who click at least one link in the email
- Unsubscribe Rate—number of contacts who click the “unsubscribe” link in an email and then follow through to successfully opt-out
- Marked as SPAM—number of subscribers who reported your email as SPAM, divided by the number sent or delivered
5. Be Consistent Across Channels
Make sure to pay attention to consumer behavior across all channels to create a single, integrated, overall view of the consumer. Then manage and personalize the email conversations with consumers across all channels. To create a relevant interaction with a consumer over every channel, you need to understand that consumer’s behavior across all channels. To do this, you need a single, cross-channel view of the consumer. Emails and different marketing channels (website, Facebook, Twitter, direct mail, etc.) must work together to coordinate the customer’s experience. You need to verify that your customer’s experience is consistent and progressive.