Most email blasts stink. They're generic, irrelevant, and come at the worst possible time. Who needs to read about a sale for flights when you just came back from vacation and have a mountain of work to catch up on? Hint: nobody. Follow our 10 best email blast tips for success in your email marketing.
The post 10 Email Blast Tips & Techniques for Success appeared first on mailfloss.
“Damn, I wish I received more email blasts.”
Said no one ever.
The truth is: email blasts are usually boring. Of the million and one emails you get per day, how many are actually useful, relevant, and timely?
All you want to do is change your name and move to Mexico.
While email marketing’s ROI is extremely tantalizing (3,800% on average), it’s hard to see those returns if your email blasts are as interesting as a can of sea cucumbers.
That’s why we’ll show you 10 email blast tips you can use to turn those cucumbers into a real party for your customers. While blastin’ loud music.
Let’s take a look!
No two subscribers are alike, and neither should your emails be.
It’s true that most of us think about email blasts as promotional emails sent to all of our subscribers at once, but it’s a bad way of thinking if we want to convert them to customers.
Instead, you should segment your audience according to their interests in your product.
When a subscriber gets your email, they should never ask: “Why am I getting this?”
Instead, they should feel like the universe aligned to present them with the unique benefits of your product.
A great example of putting email segmentation to practice comes from HubSpot:
HubSpot knows what topics you may be interested in based on your previous activity data, and they use it well!
They keep it simple and specific by describing exactly what the course is going to cover, and who will benefit from it the most.
You can use the personalization and segmentation tip by dividing subscribers according to other factors.
For example, if some subscribers came from your Facebook ads where you’re advertising one feature, add them to a list that’s explicitly interested in that feature.
And when it’s time to send the email blast, your subscribers will feel like you know them better than anyone.
We read all the time. From blog posts and texts to emails.
And while you may be making a great offer in your email blast, double-check that the email itself isn’t boring and unremarkable.
When you show that your offer is truly one of the kind, your subscribers will get the same feeling.
And if it looks just like any other email, there’ll be nothing to take notice of and seriously consider (which is kinda what you want your subscribers to do).
This tip goes for headlines and content, as well. Not just the format.
For example, Trendy Minds uses interactivity to learn more about their subscribers and direct them to personalized offers based on their responses:
Penguin Random House, on the other hand, promotes great reads by dividing them according to different states:
Both of these were very effective as they stood out from the rest of the emails. And sometimes, that’s exactly what your reluctant leads need to convert.
Some of the things you can try to make your email blasts interactive are:
If you sell to your customers and attract new ones with the same email blast, it’s like killing two birds with one stone.
And it’s completely possible.
The best two routes to take here are: offering great value (typically, with a discount that applies to both the existing customers and the person they attract), or delighting your subscribers so much with the email that they can’t resist sharing it.
This is how a lot of companies got the viral traction they needed to grow, as well.
For example, take a look at DigitalOcean’s email:
The email itself is simple, but the animation is what got it on the list of the best emails ever. People couldn’t wait to share it with their friends.
The first reason was the fact that they’d be getting account credit for it. The second was definitely the interesting animation.
Use your existing customers to reach new ones, simultaneously delighting both. Give them an incentive to share you with their friends.
And if you can’t offer a huge discount, at least offer something pretty.
So many businesses use subscription, verification and other logistical email blasts as perfunctory.
It’s a waste of perfectly good space that could be the key to turning subscribers into paying customers.
Greats, on the other hand, asks subscribers to confirm they’ve got shoe game and directs them to the brand’s social media, as well as telling them to refer a friend:
While it’s true that there should usually be just one CTA in email blasts, the only stage where this may not always be true is in the subscription/verification email.
In that stage, customers are dying to know more. Their enthusiasm and curiosity are fresh. It’s a waste of money and words not to use it by directing them to places that’ll get them hooked on your business.
Integrate best articles, social media or special offers into subscription confirmation emails and other emails that usually bore.
You can also use the info you’ve got on your subscribers (like the channels they subscribed through signifying their intent) to serve them with relevant content.
When you’ve got a serious case of inactive users, you have to ask yourself two questions:
Basically, the same thing you’d ask after a breakup.
Jokes aside, you should segment your reactivation according to possible reasons.
Someone may have just forgotten about your product (in which case – politely up your email game). They may have also stopped finding it useful and valuable.
We’ll start off this example with Fortnite. The marketing team behind the game knows it’s best when binged so when people stop playing, they draw them back in with all the benefits of their product:
AirBnB, on the other hand, shows travel aficionados what they’re missing out on if they don’t host:
First, understand why your users stopped being active, and then find a relevant way to entice them into coming back.
A discount may not necessarily help. Instead, highlight your product features and/or play on the fear of missing out and loss aversion.
One of the best email blast tips we’ve got for you is:
If you’re giving subscribers something new, make it feel new.
It’s the difference between the new car smell that car dealerships literally spray everywhere. It raises the value and builds up the anticipation.
So when you’re sending an email blast that’s new to subscribers in any way (welcome emails, new product features, offers, referrals, etc.), make it feel like a whole new world for them.
No one conveys the feeling of discovery and excitement like Apple:
Let’s be real: every new iPhone is not that cutting edge compared to the previous model and compared to what’s on the market, but Apple sure makes it feel like it is.
Use the atmosphere of discovery for more than just your welcome email. Constantly improve your email marketing, and highlight that when you’re reaching out to subscribers about something for the first time.
For example, if you usually send more long-drawn, personal statement emails, mix things up by going minimalist with the next very important email.
It’ll help keep things interesting, especially for subscribers who read your emails a lot.
Discounts, special offers and curated content are all well and good, but if you want your subscribers to be ready to hop on the next great thing you’ll show them, you have to increase their engagement.
Because of the way email newsletters work, it’s not exactly intuitive to reply to them or engage with them other than by clicking through.
However, there’s a workaround for that.
The first example is coming from AirBnB again (there’s a reason why a small startup made it this big):
While they are encouraging their subscribers to click through, this email blast is highly relevant and gives off the vibe of AirBnB truly caring about their users’ experience while on holiday.
Plus, it’s a good way to make people use their Experience feature.
The second example comes from Sweetgreen who sure know how to sweet talk their audience:
By rewarding participation and telling their subscribers what to do next, Sweetgreen makes it impossible not to engage.
If you want your subscribers to engage, go the extra mile to make their experience awesome.
Whether it’s through compliments or an appropriate tone of voice, or by offering tips on how to make the most out of their product, do something in your email blasts that delights.
There comes a time every year when everyone on the planet is looking to show their goodwill through gifts for the important people in their lives.
Which event springs to mind when you read that?
Because there’s more than just one holiday and seasonal event. From Christmas to Black Friday, people are in the mood for getting great offers for their gifts.
And they buy – a lot. In fact, US shoppers were predicted to spend over $20 billion just for Valentine’s Day alone.
When you add the other milestones and festivities, you’ve got a lot of potential emails to send. Just think about what you’re going to send when a subscriber has been using your platform for a year.
Let’s take a look at how Spotify used the end of 2016 to make their users engage more in 2017:
Incorporate seasonal happenings into your email blasts, and be consistent.
Ideally, every email should bring value to the subscriber’s table. Whether you do it through educating them or telling them about similar products they might like is up to you.
However, you shouldn’t just focus on promotional emails. That may drive sales after you send the email, but it won’t keep them coming. And since we know that about 40% of revenue comes from repeat customers, it’s in your best interest to be as friendly as possible with them.
After all, that’s how a business turns into a brand that keeps working even as the market changes.
The first, short-term way to provide value is through educational content. Just take a look at what AdWeek is doing with their webinars:
The second way is by asking for value. How? Through surveys formatted as interactive experiences, just like Trulia does:
This is the one that can keep you running for a long time. If you stay in touch with your customers, they’ll alert you to changes your company should adapt to.
In the long run, it helps you make better decisions.
If you don’t have to try too many new things because you know what to target because of your customer insight, you’ll reduce costs and increase profits.
After all, it’s all about your customers, and they know themselves better than you do.
The best email blasts are the best because they appear only for extra special opportunities.
That is the point of calling them “blasts,” after all.
And while you should work hard to make sure your subscribers are opening and loving your emails regularly, keep an eye out for extra special ideas for your blasts.
After all, the goal is to make them stick around. Not skip town.
Happy blasting!
Looking for some email marketing inspiration? Check out 15 email marketing companies to get inspiration from. We've gathered 15 companies doing email marketing well, with examples, screenshots, and tips on how to improve your own email marketing.
The post 15 Email Marketing Companies to Get Inspiration From appeared first on mailfloss.
Picasso reportedly once said good artists copy, great artists steal.
You may feel pressured to always come up with a unique idea for your business, especially if you're in the marketing space, but your ideas won't always be original, and that’s A-OK.
It's a good idea to learn from other great email marketing examples out there and implement some of those techniques in your own strategy.
Here are some of our favourite companies you can get email marketing inspiration from:
Threadless is a creative clothing retailer based in Chicago.
The first thing that stands out in the Threadless opt-in form is the simplicity of the form and how they focus on the most important thing - the customer's email address.
When running a campaign, you should not bother with other details like location and gender right away. If you're asking for two entries, a name and an email address is enough.
Yes, you may need the other details to segment your list but the important thing is getting people in the list, and single input opt-ins make that happen.
Once you have them in your list, you can then ask for the other details to segment your list and Threadless does this well.
Another thing you'll notice once you're in is how words are used to provide benefits rather than issue commands.
“GET BETTER EMAILS” is used in place of the boring “UPDATE YOUR EMAIL PREFERENCES.” Sounds better, right?
You can add great email marketing to the 1001 things you already know the e-commerce giant is good at.
Here's an example of Amazon using an email to drive engagement:
Amazon, through Associates, is trying to help its affiliates solve the one problem that's common to all of them; content idea generation.
That's what the plan looks like for March and if many of them find these topics interesting, it means more content that will provide referral traffic to Amazon.
You can implement this tactic in your business by looking for areas where an action taken by a partner will improve sales and motivate them to take that action.
How many companies fail to provide direction in their welcome emails? Too many to count, right?
Trello, the project management application has one of the best welcome notes out there.
They don't assume you know your way around. Instead, you're taken from the first step to the next on the different things you can do with your Trello account.
Each step has a little note explaining why you should perform the action and possible benefits if you do.
Do this in your business - give clear directions, even for the most mundane things.
Remember, a welcome email that provides direction is the first thing you want a prospect to see.
Medium is an online publishing platform and if you're subscribed to their daily notifications called the Medium daily digest, you'll get emails like this:
That's just one of the almost fifty posts per email you're receiving daily, and all those posts are competing for your attention.
Medium does a great job by providing snippets of these posts to readers before they click, so every writer has about fifteen words to sell a post.
The snippets influence what posts people finally decide to read, because they can't read everything.
Medium's emails teach how short, useful descriptions can get the click.
Not everyone will open your email, and from the opens you get, many close after the first two lines.
In a world of declining attention spans, you should try to keep your intro lines short, explanatory and inviting and get right into the meat of it - especially if you have a lot of meat.
Bitly is a link management system used mostly for link shortening and if there's one thing you want to learn from them, it's how they handle low email open rates.
Asking subscribers why they're not engaging with your emails is a strategy that rarely works.
Do this instead; provide value.
Bitly sends emails like this to subscribers who haven't used their services for some time.
Very few people will be able to resist the “see how many clicks your links are getting” line especially if they've created an important link in the past.
That line appeals to your self-interest and is a good way for a business to say “hey, here's how we can help you.”
If you're managing a dead or dying list, one way to get it up and running is by offering services people can get immediate value from.
Wordfence is a WordPress security plugin and if you have it installed on your site, you should receive weekly notification reports.
There's an option to upgrade to the Wordfence premium plan, which provides improved security, after every email but this report makes a good case for how the company provides value before proposing an offer.
An easy way to make money from your list even as a new player in your industry is to provide basic value everyone can access and put advanced offers up for sale.
Wordfence displays the security status of your site and you don't even need to leave your inbox.
If there's one thing that it teaches, it's that offering high-value information through email is a good way to build brand trust.
Fiverr is the world's largest freelance marketplace so you can imagine that a lot of their email marketing will involve promoting offers to entrepreneurs.
Here's how they promote expiring offers:
They get straight to it and remind you of what you're likely to miss out on in a few lines.
Selling shouldn't be a dirty word if you're doing it well. Let's face it, everyone who signs up on an email list knows there'll be an offer somewhere down the line.
How do you deal with expiring offers? By keeping it simple while giving the customer a few steps to take to redeem the offer.
That's the bottom part of the same email and it just demonstrates boring legalese in the “terms and conditions” section of the same email can be transformed into a good pitch.
One thing we all can learn from Namecheap, the domain registrar, is how to use colours and art in our emails.
Every email from Namecheap is delivered in a stylish design that doesn't fail to get the point across.
You can implement this in your business by analyzing what colours people engage with more in your emails, but you can play it safe by following some unwritten rules.
It's generally agreed that the a high-contrasting colour should be reserved for your call-to-action button and here's Namecheap doing that.
This is a Christmas offer and you can see the stylish ways Christmas trees are represented in the bottom part of the art.
Do this for a change - start playing with stylish colours in your emails.
If you have a service you want new subscribers to feel comfortable with, how do you encourage usage in a clever way?
Here's how the file hosting service, Dropbox does this:
Each step that hasn't been completed is a link so you can get right to it from your inbox and progress bars are things that always inspire action.
The email with the highest open rate is most likely your welcome email.
At that point, people are asking, so what do I do? Creating an email like this and directing prospects on the next steps to take is a warm way to welcome those new opt-ins.
If they take one step and forget to take the next you can send a reminder email linking to a button they can click on to complete a particular step.
The Hoth is an SEO agency that does well with delivering tidbits of their blog posts that provide a general summary and encourage those that want to read the entire post.
One reason your emails are not driving traffic to your blog posts is that you're either telling too little of the story or too much of the story.
Use line spacing to encourage scanning and use bullets to talk about the benefits in store for those who actually read your post.
If you provide monthly roundups of blog posts and important news on your business it will be even harder to sell each post, but just using bold fonts on your headers is a good start.
PayPal is one of the world's largest online payment processors and it survives on business transactions that occur mostly on other platforms.
It's not strange to see emails like this:
That's PayPal encouraging people to do business and even providing articles to business ideas they can work on.
Guess the first payment processor that will be on the minds of subscribers if the online business starts making money?
You can implement this in your business by promoting shoulder niches in your industry. If you're a web designer, content writing is a shoulder/related niche.
You can use your emails to encourage people to hire writers from certain agencies you trust and pitch your design service if they ever need help with those posts.
Flippa is a marketplace for buying and selling online businesses and if there's one thing e-commerce sites can learn from their marketing, it's how they deliver listings via email.
It can be difficult mining through thousands of listings on the site so Flippa mines the best deals and saves you the stress.
This is how it appears in your inbox.
In this example of a listing for a gaming store, the first question that pops up on the minds of everyone looking to buy the site is, “Can I make my money back?” and this image captures all the important data.
It's a five-year-old site with a record of profitability so you can tell it's not some 6-month project that someone got lucky with.
A bit of the site design and content management system (Shopify) is also on display so you can decide if that's something you'll want to change or not.
You can't be interested in content marketing without coming across Copyblogger, it's referred to as the bible of content marketing on the web.
Copyblogger publishes a lot of content weekly and that's a factor for being thrown into spam if you're sending out emails daily.
They do this instead:
With one weekly email broadcast called Copyblogger Weekly, you get details of all the posts published in the past week.
There's a short summary of all the posts in the body of the email and beautiful links to each of them if you want to read the full post.
There's something to learn from this; keep your emails to one or at most two broadcasts weekly.
It doesn't matter how interesting you are, people will be overwhelmed if you have little to say every day but email them anyway.
Google is one tech company that's everything from a search engine to a payment processor.
If there's one important component of Google's email marketing strategy you want to learn from, it's constantly assuring users of their safety.
That's the standard email you'll receive when you sign up to a service that requires access to your Google account.
The email also includes links to report if the access was unauthorized and how to remove a connection at any time.
If you run a business that receives sensitive data like credit card information, use your email broadcasts to build brand trust by demonstrating to your subscribers how you'll secure their information if they buy from you.
Backlinko is an SEO training business for digital marketers.
The founder, Brian Dean's use of a strategy he calls the content upgrade is something you can implement in your own business.
The content upgrade formula works by identifying high-traffic pages on your site and offering lead magnets tailored to that page to get subscribers.
That's a post on the skyscraper technique, a content marketing strategy and the little box above it provides a link to the content upgrade for this post.
You'll need to submit your email address to get access and here's what it looks like:
That's a digestible summary of the original post. Just so you know, Brian got a 785% increase in conversions by using this strategy.
It showed that targeted lead magnets convert more than generic ones. I mean, it makes sense that people reading a skyscraper technique post will be interested in a resource on the same topic.
Now that's email marketing inspiration for increasing your subscriber count. Use it wisely and reap the results.
