Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves sending promotional messages or newsletters to a list of subscribers via email. The goal is building customer relationships, promoting products or services, increasing brand awareness, and ultimately driving sales. Email has been one of the most highly used marketing channels ever since. Email marketing can take many different forms. These campaigns can include a single email announcing new content, an ongoing newsletter delivered regularly, or contacting customers about product updates.
Whether you want to boost sales through limited-time offers, maximize contributions to a donation drive, or level up your customer service through satisfaction surveys, combining SMS with email creates additional touchpoints with your audience, drives urgency, and gives you the best chance of increasing engagement and conversion.
Every email marketing strategy starts with a marketing automation platform. You can not only execute all critical email tasks from one window, but the right platform will also ensure you stay compliant with email regulations.
- Consider your unique business model and goals first.
Ask yourself and your team what you want to get out of your email marketing automation platform and how you will likely use it now and in the future as your business or organization continues to scale.
Common marketing goals for automation include:
- Acquiring more high-quality leads
- Creating upsell and cross-sell opportunities
- Preventing leaks from your sales funnel
- Boosting the lifetime value of existing customers
- Building more advocates and loyal customers
- Narrow down the Marketing Automation options with the features you need
Use this handy checklist as you do your own research or meet with different vendors.
- Functionality
- Customizability
- Management
- Simplicity
- Ease of use
- Reports
- Niche
- Price
- Scalability
- Support
- Integrations
Designing Your Emails for Campaign Success
The way your audience experiences your emails is critical to the success of your marketing efforts. How your emails look, how easy they are to read, and how they’re structured all impact deliverability, click-through, and open rates.
Here are email design best practices that will ensure your marketing emails are nurturing your audience and converting:
- Choose one topic and CTA per email
One of the most common mistakes marketers (especially course marketers) is covering too many topics and sharing too much information in an email. To avoid confusing or overwhelming your readers, each of your emails should have one clear message and one clear request. If a topic you’re covering is complex, consider breaking the emails into an anticipation-building series. - Keep your email length between 50-125 words.
While not every email has to stay beneath this word limit, you should make your emails as succinct as possible. The shorter your email is, the more likely it will be read in its entirety. - Keep the most important parts of the email at the beginning
People spend an average of ten seconds reading marketing emails. In other words, readers are not patient enough to read all the way until the end to get what they need from your email. You have to hook them by front-loading the most important info so they can get value from your emails, even when they’re short on time. - Make your email readable with line breaks and visuals
Write for readability. Break text into paragraphs that are no longer than three sentences. Use headings and bulleted lists to make your content easily skimmable. Add visuals like pictures, infographics, gifs, and memes to grab attention and keep your audience reading. - Stick to simple colors
Choose just one or two colors for your emails. Typically you’ll use your brand colors. The fewer colors you use, the cleaner your design will look, preventing the reader from being distracted from the content.
