If you’ve got been online for a while, you know that people are uninterested in reading content that doesn’t appeal to them (and that includes your customers).
- They want to skip clickbait email subject lines and stick with personalized ones.
- They want to say goodbye to unclear content and as a substitute opt for helpful thoughts and ideas.
- They want to regain the time spent reading boring emails and eat essential information as a substitute.
So how can their dreams come true? In this text, you will learn the way to create email campaigns that will engage your subscribers and enable you achieve your business goals.
Understanding the difference between newsletters and email marketing
Before we discuss how to engage with your email recipients, we first want to touch on the differences between email newsletters and marketing emails. Marketers, especially those in the a startup settingsometimes they confuse these two concepts.
Newsletters are mainly a product in themselves. This means that the only thing you promote with your newsletter is the content you set in it (nothing more and nothing less). In turn, e-mail marketing campaigns are aimed at promoting the offered product/service.
While confusing the two looks as if a small mistake, it might create a mismatch of expectations between you and the reader, which may have a huge impact on you and grow to be one of the major explanation why your subscribers don’t engage with your campaigns.
Tips on how to create campaigns that your subscribers will love
In this text, we skip some of the most regularly discussed topics (i.e. developing compelling topics, personalizing content, segmenting your target market, etc.) and as a substitute focus on practical suggestions you need to use to create campaigns that Actually engage your subscribers and email lists.
1. Ask customers what they need to read
When we first start creating an email marketing campaign, most of us play a guessing game about what our subscribers want to read and what they don’t desire to read, and this finally ends up being a fatal flaw.
Our advice could be to directly ask customers what industries they belong to and what content they would love to read just before signing up.
Even if your subscribers have been around for a very long time, you possibly can still use survey tools or conduct polls to collect data from them or ask them directly about their pain points.
If you are looking for a reference, here’s one from Vero – the company directly asks its latest subscribers about topics they’d like to read about.
2. Leverage your technology stack to understand customer opinions and topics
Alternatively, if you do not get the answers you wish, ask your subscribers directly what they need to read about. If this strategy is not for you, you need to use tools in your tech stack to understand customer conversations and opinions, reminiscent of using contact centers as a service (CCaaS) to stay in touch with them
You can use social listening tools to discover what conversations are swirling around your brand and the topics you cover, and more importantly, which topics are getting the most attention. You may also use brand sentiment evaluation tools to understand why customers are interacting with you.
For example, using such tools, Hims & Hers found that customers regularly interacted with them to learn more about health and wellness topics.
That’s why they win the hearts and attention of their subscribers by writing and sharing topics that really interest them and help them. WITH dealing with anxiety and stress in providing resources for personalized healthcare, Hims & Hers leaves no trace in its email content offering.
CRM (customer relationship management) tools also enable you gain insight into patterns and behaviors.
For example, with real estate CRM software, real estate agents can now replicate the language their clients use and create marketing materials and emails written in the same way.
This level of personalization ensures that your campaigns resonate with your audience, resulting in higher click-through rates and greater customer loyalty. What’s not to love?
3. Use interactive content to engage your subscribers
Let’s be honest – no one likes boring content, even if it concerns a topic that interests us.
Your customers are the same. You can send them educational content, personalize topics, add helpful information, and sift through all the clutter, but if your emails aren’t well-organized and interactive, your customers won’t prefer it.
So what are you able to do as a substitute, you ask? The answer is easy: you invest in interactive content.
This means a lot of images, GIFs, page breaks, white lines, visual elements, live captionsembedded and even emoji.
Pro tip: You can also think about using heat maps to understand how your subscribers eat content and what details they engage with most frequently. This allows you to then create and organize your emails.
4. Use human psychology to intrigue them
Human psychology determines how, when and why your subscribers read your emails. So it’s price using this to your advantage to make your subscribers read your emails longer and convert.
For example, some suggestions Katelyn Bourgaina marketer specializing in human psychology recommends the use of:
- Using a specific time as opposed to a regular time (e.g. “Sale ends in 37.5 hours” as a substitute of “Sale ends in 50 hours”).
- Not giving the subscriber 1000’s of selections and limiting himself to a few options.
- Using first names to refer to customers.
- Adding mystery items to excite customers (e.g. “Free mystery gift if you buy the item today”).
5. Refine your strategy with A/B testing and analytics
And finally, the whole lot email marketing campaigns you have to go through a cycle of updates and fixes, but the only things that will enable you move in the right direction are A/B testing and customer analytics.
Use yours email marketing tools to understand send times, find customer personas, segment your email clients, and more. Use all the insights from these tools to improve your conversion rates.
Find other insights about StartupNation
If you own, manage or are a part of a startup, one thing is certain – you possibly can learn a lot every day.
StartupNation is here to help – we have the knowledge and information to enable you grow your startup (consider us your digital mentor) and improve your email marketing strategies.
Are you ready to gain email subscribers with a successful email marketing campaign?
Avoid promotional emails and stick to personalized emails and you are already one step ahead of the game. This is your only email campaign yet!