What makes a great email?
When targeting new or existing customers, there are many benefits to email communications. Not only does this type of communication reach your audience quickly, but you can also instantly analyse who has received it, whether they have read it and what elements with which they have interacted. While these are all positive outcomes of email, there are elements to consider in getting your audience to even open your comms, ensuring you stand out in your customers mailbox.
An attention-grabbing subject line
You have only limited words to entice and engage your audience. This is the first thing they will see, so it is important to keep it relevant to the email content but also punchy and interesting, ensuring your audience want to find out more. Testing is key to establish what success looks like with your audience and most email marketing platforms will have an A/B test function. This gives you the opportunity to keep your email content the same but try out different subject lines to see which people engage with. Try out distinctive styles like:
- Curiosity – This could be in the format of a question, or a ‘did you know’ statement. This should leave you audience wanting to read on to find out more.
- Urgency – This works if you want your audience to act, often using the word hurry gives readers a sense of time is running out and they are likely to act straight away rather than leave the email unread in their mailbox.
- Personalized – Who doesn’t love anything that’s tailored to them. This will make your audience feel good, and like that you have taken the time to create something just for them. The great news is most email platforms will do this for you with the right filters and some good data.
A taste of what’s to come
Once you’ve got your subject line created, think about your pretext. What do we mean by pretext? It’s the little bit of text you see in your inbox just under the subject line but before you open the email. This should give your audience a little sneak peek into what’s inside. To see how your subject line, pretext and email body can all work together look at our recipe for email success, available on Accelerate.
The main event
Your email content should be informative, engaging, and easy for your audience to read without being too long. Ideally you want your contacts to be able to spend a few minutes digesting the message and then completing any actions within the email. Break the text up into small paragraphs that lead into one another, this will make it easy for your audience to read without feeling overwhelmed. Use sub headers to highlight specific sections and lead into the text, so for those who only have a minute to skim read your email, get a feel for the subject matter immediately.
Get creative
There are so many ways you can present your email. Thankfully, we moved on from only plain text to a more exciting visually engaging time, so embrace it with your email comms and reflect your brands look and feel, whilst considering the following when designing your emails:
- Header images – Make them relatable to your message, and keep in mind your brand. You want your audience to know who sent it.
- Side bars – Great for highlighting a downloadable asset or key stats as it stands out.
- Call to action buttons – Think about a rounded edge, bolding the text and adding some colour to make it obvious to your audience.
The key to success
It all comes down to data. You can build the fanciest all singing, all dancing email but without a good set of leads your email is going nowhere. So how can you ensure that you have the cream of the crop when it comes to data?
Start by thinking about what you need from your data, the minimum requirements are:
- Email address
- First name
- Surname
Clean data not only means your email will send to the correct audience, but it will also reduce the amount of spam and bounce backs. Plus, you can offer a personalised welcome to your audience.
Secondly, consider grouping your data. Analyse common factors, this could be dependent on access to certain services. Once you have your audiences segmented into smaller groups then you can create a more bespoke email journey, which should translate into a better engagement rate.
So, all that is left to do is to read our recipe for email success Infographic and start building your unique email communications and watch your audience engage and grow.
Don’t forget to make use of the resources available to you
To help get you started with your own 2022 marketing strategy, we have created a downloadable infographic that can be accessed via the Gamma Portal. Simply go to >> Help & Support >> Gamma Accelerate >> Collateral and search ‘Recipe for email success’
Every Gamma Channel Partner has free access to Accelerate, our online partner marketing portal; a simple and secure platform that’s designed to make it easy for you to customise white-label marketing material, generate new leads and engage with prospects and customers.
To access Accelerate go to the Gamma Portal >> Help and Support >> Gamma Accelerate
