“Email marketing” — meaning relentlessly blasting your prospects in the hope of getting a few lukewarm leads — has gone the way of the dinosaur. Email, however, is still a necessary and powerful tool when it comes to connecting with your target market. That said, there is a right way and a wrong way to use it. If you want to leverage email to attract and engage your prospects as opposed to irritating and alienating them, there are certain rules to follow.
How to Connect More Effectively Via Email
Before you send your next mass email, give some consideration to these proven best practices:
- Be clear on your goal. If you’re not sure what you want the prospect to do (click, call, be amused, be informed, etc.), they certainly won’t know what you want them to do. One of the quickest ways to earn an “unsubscribe” request is to frustrate the recipient. Have a clear call to action (CTA) designed to accomplish your goal.
- Email people who have expressed an interest in hearing from you. This goes without saying, but bears repeating. And if your response is, “We don’t have many/any people who have said they want to receive our emails,” that’s another problem altogether, and outside the scope of this post! (But we can help.)
- Personalize your emails. Nobody likes (and few respond to) emails that begin with “Hello!” because no effort has been made to learn/insert the person’s first name. A marketing automation tool like HubSpot can handle this process with ease. (And, yes, we are a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner, but we were singing their praises long before we joined them!)
- Send your emails from a personal account. Emails with a “Do Not Reply” kind of origin are much less likely to be opened.
- Test your emails. You are doing your recipients and yourself a favor if you test multiple subject lines and body copy on a subset of your list to determine what gets you the best engagement.
- Use subject lines that genuinely reflect the content. Getting people to open your emails with deceptive subject lines will definitely come back to haunt you. The open rate looks great, but there will be a correspondingly high unsubscribe rate. Be honest.
- Cull unengaged recipients from our list. While someone may have given you permission to email them, if your analytics shows that they are repeatedly ignoring your emails, suppress them from your mailings. You don’t have to delete their record entirely, of course, but if they continue to receive emails from you that don’t interest them, they may ultimately unsubscribe, and you don’t want that.
Own Their Inbox!
As email volumes continue to soar, there’s an art to getting yours opened, read, and engaged with. We’ve been continually fine-tuning our skill in that area for more than two decades, and helping our clients achieve outstanding results. As a leading content marketing agency in Colorado Springs that serves companies large and small nationwide, we can help you get unfettered access to your ideal inbox. Let’s talk!
