Trending
Email marketing – if you use it wisely — can be one of your greatest assets. Contrary to popular myth, email is still hyper-effective for your marketing efforts. Even 73% of millennials, a generation savvy with social media, prefer for businesses to communicate by email.
Yet in order to compel an email recipient to not only open your email but actually engage with your firm, you’re going to need to be proactive with your email strategy. These 5 email composition tips will propel your emails from mediocrity to peak effectiveness.
1. Use a Great Subject Line
Your email’s subject line is the very first thing a prospect will see. More often than not, it’s the deciding factor for whether or not they’re going to open your email. Therefore it goes without saying that your subject line should be attention-catching.
In order to grab a reader’s attention, think from their point of view. What would compel your target audience to click? Speak to them directly- use their curiosity to your advantage, utilize personalized speech or ask a question.
On Lead Pilot, you have the capability to customize your email subject line. In this case, the subject is changed to be more specific to a California-based audience.
Beware, though: you don’t want your subject lines to sound too “clickbait-y.” This is an easy way to get your email deleted before it’s even opened. Entice their curiosity, but avoid sounding too cheesy or artificial.
2. Choose the Right Sender Name
Your sender name, while it may seem like a minute detail, is how a recipient recognizes you and your brand. If you haven’t set up a sender name and it’s simply your plain email address, your emails carry the risk of appearing unprofessional. It’s a good rule of thumb to start with your full name and to add on some sort of identifying label- either your firm’s name or your license.
Here’s an example of what to do and what not to do as far as your sender name. As you can see, the same advisor looks much more professional and legitimate on the right- and a reader would be much more likely to open the email on the right than the email on the left. The sender name is clear and communicative, and as a bonus, the subject line is more compelling too. This is a great way to quickly differentiate yourself in a recipient’s inbox and allow them to recognize you.
3. Provide Value
Your newsletter content should be 90% educational and 10% promotional. Even though it serves as part of your marketing funnel, the sole purpose of your newsletter isn’t to urge readers to hire you- and at the end of the day, a reader isn’t going to want to hire you if you’re only sharing self-serving content.
Make sure you’re sharing informational content. Show them what you’re about and what you know. You don’t have to nix all promotional content, but always strive to maintain a balance. Share educational, informative and timely content that your audience will find relevant to their specific problems.
This example from FMA Advisory describes an informative market-related email newsletter. With this, readers are sure about what they’re going to receive from this firm and know it will be valuable content for them.
4. Keep it Consistent
Similar to choosing the right sender name, it’s important to keep a consistent feel for your brand across email newsletters. If all of your emails look different, you’re going to appear sporadic and not memorable. To keep your branding consistent, solidify your logo and brand colors so your communications always look the same.
In this example, Summers Financial has a consistent logo, layout, and color scheme for their email design. By doing this, your emails will always be easily identifiable and you stand a better chance of becoming distinguished in a prospect’s mind.
Importantly, you want this branding to remain the same across all platforms. That means you want your logo and color scheme to not only be consistent in every email but consistent across your emails, website and social media profiles. Doing so will increase your engagement and make your user experience more streamlined rather than confusing and disjointed.
5. Use Images
Visuals increase someone’s desire to read your content by 80%. Incorporating visuals into your email is a subtle strategy, but goes a long way when it comes to engagement.
All people are visual learners, processing visuals at an insanely higher rate than text. People will understand an image without you even having to say anything, and people like having the chance to do that.
You can customize visuals in your email newsletter in order to more effectively convey your message and communicate with readers, as in the example above. Additionally, you can experiment with other visual content strategies, such as infographics or video.
Many aspects go towards your email marketing being the best it can be. Even if your content is great, sometimes people aren’t reading simply because you’re not presenting that content in the best way. Heed these 5 tips to better market your content, entice readers and boost email engagement.