With so many other ways to keep in touch digitally and so many other places businesses can compete for attention, email may not seem like a good first choice for communicating with your customers. And yet, while it’s no secret that many people ignore their emails these days, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach customers.
To make your emails stand out, you’ll need to employ a few strategies to make your emails more enticing and able to grab the attention of your target audience. Here, nine members of Young Entrepreneur Council share their best tips for creating effective marketing emails and why they work so well.
Young Entrepreneur Council members discuss methods businesses can use to make their emails more appealing for customers.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Have A Branded Content Strategy
With the increasing popularity of newsletter platforms like Substack, having a branded content strategy as part of your marketing is one of the best ways to cut through the noise. Don’t make the mistake of talking about your company or your product. An email inbox is a very intimate place, so you must think of the recipient as the audience, not the customer. Connect with the reader in a way that is personal to them. The goal should be relationship and loyalty, not sales. – Anik Decoste, MTTR
2. Make The Emails About The Reader
The secret to getting people to read your emails and stop ignoring them is to make the emails about the reader, not about your business. Too many businesses think that their business will attract an audience by talking about who they are all the time and what they have to offer. This doesn’t work. Everything you do as a business needs to be about serving and providing value. This is when you will see your subscribers opening your emails—when they know you are doing it for them and they have something to gain by reading what’s inside. – Diego Orjuela, Cables & Sensors
3. Focus On Topics Your Audience Actually Cares About
Because so much email is hype, you can set yourself apart by focusing on actual topics that your audience cares about. Avoid typical marketing advice about free offers, deals that are closing soon and the like. If these aren’t redirected to spam folders, people are likely to delete them without consideration as they see hundreds of similar messages every day. If you have a truly exceptional offer, you can highlight it in the email. However, as a rule, it’s better to focus on solving problems and providing useful information. As long as you have links and calls to action in your messages, you don’t have to make the whole email promotional. – Kalin Kassabov, ProTexting
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4. Create Healthy Email Domains
Make sure you have healthy email domains. The score of your emails is often dictated through qualitative delivery metrics aggregated over time. By selecting a separate email to perform email campaigns, delivering quality email and utilizing an email warming service, you can ensure more emails are landing in an inbox rather than in spam. It’s a bit of a time investment, but certainly worth the effort if it means that more people are going to actually read your emails. You certainly don’t want to spend time and/or money getting quality emails only for them to land in a junk folder that will never be read. You have to put in the groundwork to get the results you’re looking for. In the long run, it’ll be worth that initial work you put in to make sure you have your ducks in a row. – Tyler Quiel, Giggster
5. Play On The Need To Take Action
The human brain is hardwired to respond to urgency and competition. As such, marketers should be appealing to this facet of our nature with their messaging, especially in our inboxes. For me, the most effective emails are those that play on the need to take action now—book the service, buy the product, purchase the tickets, because if I don’t do it now, I may never be able to again (at least, not at such a bargain price). Scarcity marketing goes hand in hand with appealing to my competitive nature—if there are limited quantities available, it makes me want it more. Even though my brain knows deep down there are always more deals coming down the line, the right marketing language can make me whip out my credit card now, which is really what every company wants. – Ashley Sharp, Dwell with Dignity
6. Use Captivating Images And Media
To create more enticing emails that resonate with your audience, use captivating images. The right media will easily grab their attention and make it easier for them to open future emails and boost engagement for your campaigns. Adding images also breaks the monotony so subscribers aren’t constantly bombarded by walls of text. It makes your email content more fun to engage with so you can collect more user data and continue creating relevant, high-converting email campaigns. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
7. Segment Your Email List
One way to make your emails more enticing to your subscribers is to segment your email list. People will open your emails only if they are genuinely interested in your content. When you segment your email list it becomes easier for you to target your audience with more relevant content. It’s a very good way to boost your email open rate. Increasing your open rate is super important to achieving your conversion goal. After all, your subscribers will know about your offer only when they read the email. – Josh Kohlbach, Wholesale Suite
8. Get Your Frequency Just Right
Emails sent by brands and publications become engaging when they appear on a regular basis with enough time in between to make their appearance special. Some companies experience a high success rate sending an email or publishing a blog post just once a month. Their content is so in-depth and useful that customers look forward to them. When your audience subscribes to your email list, let them know that they’ll get only essential emails with your best content. This simple approach to email marketing will keep engagement rates high even when you don’t send content often. Of course, you have to back your emails with well-researched and insightful material that makes each one worth waiting for. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
9. Personalize Subject Lines And Content
The key to creating engaging emails is to personalize your subject lines and content. To do this, you need to start segmenting your email list from the very beginning. Asking your customers about their interests in your email subscription form will help you group people based on interests. You can also use your CRM tools and use customer purchasing behavior as a way to make segments. When you segment your email list, you’ll find great ideas to make your emails more personalized and interesting to users. Your audience will feel like your email is “for” them, and they’ll be more likely to open your emails and even click on the links within them. – Blair Williams, MemberPress
