Email is a favored B2B marketing tactic, relied upon by many of our clients. For that reason, we try to track and pass along the latest expert thinking on the subject …for example, our recent post “7 tips for improving your email marketing effectiveness.” Given the ever-increasing hazards of overflowing in-boxes and spam filtering, it seems we all have to keep working smarter just to maintain email’s usefulness.
So it was good to come across a recent set of email best-practice pointers from The Marketing Maven. As usual, you’ll find more by clicking on over than we’ve summarized here…
Identify yourself recognizably. Be sure your company or brand name appears in the email ‘From’ line. Research shows that email from obscure or “cooked”-looking addresses has lower open rates and higher delete and spam-filter capture rates.
Write compelling subject lines. Think of it as a newspaper headline, and compose short, benefit-oriented subject lines: “New heart valves last a lifetime”, or “White paper discusses EchoSoft Release 7 enhancements.” Your subject line has by far the most leverage in determining whether your message gets opened, so you can’t afford to just dash it off. If you’re torn between two versions, try testing them on different sub-segments of your list to see which works best.
Remember the preview pane. Many people use their email program’s preview pane to get a quick idea of an email’s contents before committing to opening it. The Maven says: “Put the most important information and a call to action in the top 300-500 pixels of your email to grab the interest of your audience. Don’t waste that space with large images or an overpowering header.”
Provide relevant content. It should go without saying, but: “The most important thing you can do … is to provide content that is so interesting to your audience that they look forward to every email you send.” First and foremost, that means content that helps them do their jobs: how-to articles, best practices, mini-case studies, application ideas, etc.
Use images wisely. They’ll add visual interest and relevancy to your emails. Consider adding thumbnails of white paper covers, product images, photographs of interview subjects, etc. But be aware – many of your email recipients will have images turned off, so be sure they don’t interfere with your text.
Write short, focused copy. Resist any temptation to stray from the purpose of the email and the action you want readers to take. Use bold headlines, short paragraphs and sentences, bulleted lists of benefits. If your email is of the newsletter type, provide only brief summaries of the articles in the email, then have the readers click over to a Web page containing the full text.
Test, test, test. Track the key metrics of the emails you send (open rate, click-thru rate, conversion rate) and test different elements: the subject line, your offer and where it is placed, the overall layout, copy, and day & time of sending. Simply split your list in half and send a different version of the email to each half. Sure, you can only test one thing at a time that way; but you can make incremental changes based on what you learn in testing, resulting in continuous improvement over time.
You probably consider email an essential tool for moving your leads through the buying cycle; why not treat it with that same degree of importance, by following these best practices? Your business will be glad you did.
