Email marketing helps businesses to attract new customers while maintaining a close relationship with the existing loyal customers. Marketers can easily connect with the customers and prospects in a highly targeted way by a simple email and that is what makes email marketing by far the most effective way of growing your business. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing is responsible for bringing in $40 for every $1 spent.
Email marketing continues to be one of the top marketing channels that every retailer likes to use. ROI (return on investment) is one of the most captivating reasons why email marketing is beneficial in promoting your e-Commerce store. Learn more about how to make use of email marketing to promote your e-commerce store.
Today, we will be going over some of the best practices for creating successful email newsletters.
Mobile first approach
Responsive design is one of the hottest topics these days in web industry. Why? – Well, majority of people are either using a smartphone, tablet or some kind of mobile device in order to go on the web and to check their emails. So, it makes perfect sense that along with all the content on the web, emails should be responsive too.
According to Movable Ink (consumer device preference report), 66 percent of emails are opened on either a smartphone or tablet device. This open rate of emails on smartphones is increasing at a very fast pace with the increasing number of mobile devices. So, it is quite important for online businesses to send out emails that are optimized for smartphone readers as well as desktop users.
A few important points to keep in mind to follow mobile first approach for your emails:
- Keeps the size of the buttons large enough so that email recipients can easily click on those buttons from a mobile device
- Try to keep your marketing emails short, interesting, and relevant
- A single column responsive template always works best for creating mobile friendly emails
Adding personalization
Statistics shows that personalized newsletter emails increases the engagement and readers are more likely to open the email(s) when they see their name. In order to ensure that your marketing emails/newsletters are personalized, you need to collect customer’s data at every point (more than just email address). People love to see their name when it comes to communication between an online business and customer because that’s how humans communicate. Adding personalization adds some kind of authenticity to an email.
Personalized emails can be created in several ways such as:
- Dear “first name”
- Adding recent purchase information in the email
- Wishing customer on his/her birthday (or offering some kind of discount)
Adding preview text and catchy subject lines
Getting someone to open your email is one of the biggest challenges in email marketing. When a recipient/reader receives a notification about an email, it only takes a few seconds for the reader to decide whether he/she is going to open that email or not. Marketers spend a lot of time in creating interesting content for the email but if reader decides not to open that email, all the time and effort that went into putting together an email goes to waste. Always make sure to follow these practices when you are sending out an email to your customers:
- Add pre-header preview text (a short summary of the content in 1 single line).
Many email clients like outlook displays the pre-header preview text when an email comes to the inbox. Adding a pre-header preview text allows the reader to read the short summary about the content and the recipient is more likely to open your email. - Try to be creative when it comes to subject lines.
You can create personalized subject line or question based subject line that helps in motivating the recipients to open your email.
Quality content
If readers don’t find your email(s) interesting, they are simply going to delete it without even opening it. That’s the nature of email marketing, if content is interesting readers are more likely to open your email but if readers don’t find your email interesting, they are either going to delete your email from the inbox or unsubscribe. So, it is quite important for marketers and online businesses to create quality content when it comes to email marketing. Quality content and email open rate is directly proportional to each other – if the quality of the email content is good, the open rate will be higher.
Some ideas for online businesses to create interesting/quality content for emails:
- Send out emails on sneak peak of new products
- Send out emails for educating your customers (with links to blog posts/articles)
- Try to answer most commonly asked questions in your emails
nopCommerce allows your customers to subscriber to newsletters. nopCommerce also offers a tool for creating your own custom newsletters and email campaigns. It can also be integrated with third-party newsletter services (e.g. MailChimp).
Author: Lavish Kumar