The anatomy of an effective email marketing campaign
What are some best practices to consider when designing a “high-conversion” email marketing campaign?
The anatomy of an effective email marketing campaign consists of a few simple but important components. In the world of marketing, if it doesn’t convert then it doesn’t work.
A “conversion” means that someone took the action that you wanted them to take. Whether that’s them buying a product you linked in your campaign, calling your store to make a donation, or attending an event that you want to promote by RSVP-ing.
Not everyone is going to convert, but some of your email marketing campaigns should for sure work. We will later get into creating different email “audiences” or “lists” to target different things people care about. This is so your messages are received best by the groups of individuals they are for.
Example: Customers in the Sunshine Acres Boutique & Thrift Store might care more about sales going on verse those who want volunteer opportunities.
Photos
The use of photos have a bigger impact on your marketing campaign conversion rate than you would think. 90% of the information processed by the brain is visual. Our reality as marketers is that we only have seconds to capture someone's attention. Your image just might be the converter that keeps them on your email longer.
When choosing the photos for your campaign, make sure that they are, first, brightly lit and of high quality. The average smart phone works just fine as technology has advanced. Try and take your photos in a well-lit area, or, if you can’t, most phones have a built in photo editor to adjust the exposure, brightness, and contrast for your image within seconds. For a busy entrepreneur or store manager, this is a go-to option.
Your image should also not be cluttered with unnecessary objects. The more distracting the photo is, the more you will lose the interest of your audience. They want to know why they should care. Your image is the first thing they will see when they open your email. If your image does not represent your message, you may see a higher “bounce rate” on your campaigns.
Scannable Content
If you get them past the first click, they might not always stay there. To help alleviate your “bounce rate”, or someone who went to your marketing content without making any clicks per your “Call To Action”, make sure that your content is easy to read, scannable, and with use of icons, bolded fonts, or smaller paragraphs.
Someone should be able to scan your email marketing campaign within seconds and understand what the purpose is. If they care, they will stay longer to read the whole thing and possibly even take that action you hoped they would.
Your biggest ally in refining your email marketing approach is to collect feedback. Whether you are able to do this in-store with your employees, or ask your followers over social media platforms, curiousity will be one of your greatest teachers and rapport-builders. People like giving business to companies who ask for feedback and care how others perceive their business practices.
Company Branding Is Design Best Practice
I saved the simplest part of what makes an effective email marketing campaign for last. It’s arguable to say that an unnoticed design is actually a GOOD design. It’s not within the colors or busy graphics that your user converts. It’s with the consistency in how you use your company logo, colors, and font styles in a clean, easy-to-read format that builds their trust and attention.
Consider any major brand that is out there. If you receive marketing emails or ads from a company like Nike, you don’t recall the colors of the font titles, do you? No. You remember you saw something from Nike and you will remember it even more if it was something that you cared about. This is the power of using your company’s branding as a way to have people recognize where the information is coming from. It’s of course in the trial and error method of tracking your analytics on whether or not your messages are worth the time of your audience.
If your company does not have a “Brand Style Guide”, just take note of what colors or fonts your company currently has on their website, graphics, or internal communication materials. A quote to take this point home: “A simple design does not only offer clarity and imprints into the viewers' brains, but it also provides psychological benefits to the recipients. It has been proven that simple designs are more accessible to process and remember than complex ones.”
Research makes perfect
Most email or social media marketing tools can be used for FREE, with no need to afford expensive cameras or outsource services to professionals. If you can get the hang of it yourself, it’s one of your company’s biggest superpowers. Everyone loves a connected company.
Look up YouTube videos or Google best practices for taking photos with smartphones. There are lots of experts in this space that literally want to tell you how to do everything…for FREE! Also, it’s helpful to review the exact best practices per the image you want to take. If it’s a product shot of something you want to sell, it should only be showing the exact products you are trying to feature in a well-lit area. If you are trying to take photos of people, make sure they all have their eyes open, are standing tall, and the more natural or “in the moment” they look the better. Cookie-cutter content can be your catastrophe. The more real and relatable your content is the more chance you have to connect with your audience.. authentically.
Buzzwords
Audience
“The email addresses of individuals in your email lists you target.”
Automation
“Ways to create email campaigns that can be scheduled to post on a calendar automatically.”
Bounce rate
Google: “A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.”
Brand Style Guide
“A brand style guide is a holistic set of standards that defines your company's branding. It references grammar, tone, logo usage, colors, visuals, word usage, point of view, and more.”
Conversion
“An action that you wanted a user to take.”
Conversion Rate
“A conversion rate records the percentage of users who have completed the desired action.”
Email Lists
“An email list is simply a list of emails that businesses have gathered from visitors/customers that would like to receive information, updates, discounts, and other details about your business in a digital format that is sent to their email inbox.”
Email Marketing Campaign
“An email marketing campaign is a coordinated set of individual email messages that are deployed across a specific period of time with one specific purpose. These specific purposes or calls-to-action (CTAs) can include the following: download a white paper, sign up for a webinar, or make a purchase.”
Email Subject Line Title
Desktop View
Mobile View
Open Rate
“Open Rate is an email marketing metric that measures the percentage rate at which emails are opened.”
Phone Photo Editor
“Photo editors are responsible for the look of final photographs to be published in a book or periodical or that appear digitally.” The way to modify each image per the photo editor depends on the phone’s program itself. Photo editing on an iPhone will be different than on an Android.
Preheader Text
Desktop View
Mobile View
Rapport
“Rapport is a harmonious relationship between people who have established mutual trust.”
Scannable Content
“Scannable content is short, sweet and to the point. Sentences and paragraphs are brief. Bold text and bullet points highlight key points. Links to other content are used to provide your readers with supplemental information.”
Scheduling Posts
“Creating a social media posting schedule means you can automate links to your posts to go out at certain times of the day on a regular basis, which helps you: Save time.”
“Spammy”
With the use of words like:
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Target Audiences
“A Target Audience is defined as the group of individuals, or for email marketing purposes the specific list or segment, at which a campaign is aimed. It's the target demographic for each marketing effort. It's also who would be most likely to convert, based on each targeted email campaign you send.”
Email Templates
“Email marketing template is a pre-made template that gives marketers a starting point for their email. Templates are often referenced when marketers don't want to start from scratch and build out an email wireframe with custom coding from the ground up.”
Articles Researched
https://www.constantcontact.com/blog/what-is-email-marketing-2/
https://www.constantcontact.com/email-marketing/email-campaign-ideas
https://www.constantcontact.com/blog/what-is-email-marketing-automation/
https://www.constantcontact.com/blog/email-marketing-campaign-2/
https://movableink.com/blog/29-incredible-stats-that-prove-the-power-of-visual-marketing
Google top results for “Buzzwords” section approved by me.