5 rules of engaging email marketing

Email marketing can be a tough field. After battling the spam filters and instant unsubscribers, you have to make sure people not only open your email (most don’t), but also read it and click through. Fortunately there are some very simple rules to follow to make the most out of your email marketing messages, to drive up engagement and convert them directly into sales.

1. Catchy subject line

The subject line should be your primary focus when thinking about the copywriting of your email. This is the first thing anyone sees when they receive your email, and more often than not, the only thing. As such, you cannot allow it to be left as an afterthought.

Even if the recipient does not read the email, or deletes it, they cannot un-read the subject line. Make it count by writing a subject line that catches the attention and remains in the minds of your target audience.

2. Straight to the point

Many email clients on both desktop and mobile provide a quick preview of the text content of your email, next to or below the subject line. If your email begins with “Email not displaying correctly?”, that’s a lost opportunity.

The very first sentence of the email should be a sort of a “secondary subject line”. Since it’s often displayed in conjuction with the subject line, this should be something that expands on the topic or offer first extended by the subject line, while being a sentence that can also stand on its own.

3. Single call-to-action

Many email newsletters and marketing emails contain a bunch of different offers and points, each of which has a separate link or button that goes to a wholly separate place. Avoid this.

Your recipient generally doesn’t spend more than 5 seconds looking at an email. Do not waste a single one of these precious seconds by making the user figure out what they should click, if anything. Have a single, big, simple button for the user to click. It’s much easier for a user to decide whether they should click something or not, than to evaluate the multiple-choice question that having many call-to-actions pose.

If you want to communicate several different offers or points, it’s generally better to break them apart into several emails that are sent in 24 to 48 hour intervals. This way your emails remain concise, with a single no-brainer call-to-action each, and your brand will continue to pop up into the recipient’s mind each time they receive an email, thus enforcing it in their long-term memory.

4. Keep it short and sweet

Emails are not articles. Generally people who are reading email are not doing so in a “session”; rather, they are looking at incoming emails whenever it is that they are alerted to their arrival. As such, nobody will read a long novel based on an impromptu notification.

Much like anywhere else on the internet, if readers see a big long wall of text, they will quickly close it again, and never return. They might think “oh, I’ll read that later”, but they never actually will.

As such, keep your email as short as it possibly can be. Do not take this lightly. Emails can potentially be as long as they need to be, but you should still think of them as a sort of an “extended tweet”. Set your text into a slightly larger font size than usual, with 1,5x line spacing, and no more than 10–15 words per line. Do not have more than two or three sentences per paragraph. Do not have more than two consecutive paragraphs. Break text content up with pictures or a centered call-to-action button. If users have to scroll more than once to see it all, you have failed.

5. Clear, single-click unsubscribe

Provide recipients with a single-click way of unsubscribing from all future mailings permanently.

It can feel counterintuitive to provide recipients with an easy way to unsubscribe, and thus, many email marketers generate simple barriers to unsubscribing: unsubscribers must fill out a survey, or type in their email address, or send a reply, or even log in to some account they don’t remember the credentials for.

However, there’s very little point in retaining subscribers that aren’t interested in receiving your newsletter. If they can’t figure out how to unsubscribe (or there is a barrier, however simple), they will simply mark your email as spam. Spam filters are crowd-sourced these days, so if many users of an email service mark your stuff as spam, you will soon be automatically marked as spam for everyone.

Unwilling recipients will also quickly become hostile towards your brand, and in the age of social media, this hostility is quick to spread. And of course, in the end, there’s the mundane reason that sending each email costs you money, and you don’t want to waste that money on people who will not convert.

—

Grabby is a platform that allows you to collect email addresses from a list of websites fast and easy, and for less than 5 cents an hour. Try out your first project today at https://www.grabby.io