5S of Emails — Crucial Strategies for Email Marketing

Email communication is the lifeblood of our lives. From first thing in the morning to the minute before we go the bed, we’re checking our inboxes if not composing new emails. Emails are important for all business functions yet they are especially critical for marketing as we all count on some sort of email outreach for our campaigns. However it’s not the 90’s anymore when you hit send and expect a response. You need to apply best practices to increase your ROI. Like other posts in this series, below are the top 5 strategies for effective emails. These 5 tips will help you get ahead of the pack and increase your lead generation efforts. They’re the 5S of Emails:

• Subject Line
• Short Content
• Segmentation
• Super Urgency
• Storytelling

• Apply 5S of Emails to Increase Your ROI[/caption]

1. Subject Line: The probability of that your email can be flagged as a spam is affected by various factors. For some of them you have limited control, i.e., recipient settings, your IP address, etc. But the number one thing that will increase your open rates under your control is a solid subject line. You should spend same amount of time for deciding the subject line as you spend for writing the body of your email. Make sure to keep it relevant, short and avoid spam trigger words i.e., free, deal, unique, etc. Use personalized and enticing lines: “Jack, quick question” or “Thoughts about <recipient’s newly launched product>” Personalization on subject line itself will increase your open rates more than 29%. Of course like we discussed earlier, don’t forget to test different subject lines and measure the results.
2. Short Content: You probably know by now that most people will read the emails you send on their mobile devices. You are competing for the reader’s attention with an average of 121 incoming emails that day. Most people will not have time to read all the fancy details of your content. After you draft your email, you should challenge yourself to trim it down to maximum of 10 lines. Your CTR will increase 17% if you just halve your content. Do not use any embedded images or HTML codes unless necessary and do not include any attachments as these will increase your chances of getting flagged as spam. Also the larger your email file gets, the longer it takes to load on recipient’s device. If you really need to send an attachment, upload your attachment to your server, copy the URL for your attachment and paste it to your email body. Size matters… Shorter the better!
3. Segmentation: Whether you work in a big or small company, promote your own product or others, do not forget the golden rule: Emails should be segmented! People will not connect with your generic self promotion unless there is something relevant, something personal, something they can learn from it. Even if you don’t know the recipient on a personal level, you can still say a thing or two about her company, her industry or her function. Instead of sending one email to your entire target list you should segment them by personas and send unique emails to each segment.
4. Super Urgency: You have a purpose for composing emails. You want your recipients to take a simple action in your email, i.e., “Reply me”, “Click this link”, “Forward to you friend”, but unless you instruct them to do soon, they’ll not do it. You don’t want them to think ”Oh this is a good deal, let me perform the requested action next week.” The instant they postpone to take your action item, there is a big chance that you’ll never hear from them. Instead of “Reply me, try “Reply me by 5pm.” Make them feel left out if they do not take immediate actions i.e., losing to their competitors or failing to deliver for their customers. Do not hesitate to apply FUD strategies generously to invoke super urgency.
5. Storytelling: You want to inform your recipients, make them to take actions, be concise yet all these things should be done without being boring. Best way to accomplish this mission is by storytelling. The recipients will not remember your product name or the details of your promotion but they’ll certainly remember say, how you, ex-high school linebacker, won the championships despite your quarterback could not make to the final game or how yesterday in traffic you saw a yellow 95 Corolla with 9 people in it. Consider your email recipients as your audience at a TED Conference. You would not just tell them to click your promotional URL in the backdrop. Ideally, the best storytelling in email would be with a case study about a happy and credible customer. You don’t need to construct a narrative from scratch though. Be creative, as you just need some levers to make your points interesting and credible. For instance couple of months ago one of my work had been referenced at Wall Street Journal. In my next relevant email campaign, I did not hesitate to start with the WSJ story and tie back to my recipients’ needs… And as you might have guessed, I observed a significant lift in my response rates.

Remember to apply “5S of Emails” before your next email campaign and share your results with me either commenting below or contacting me.

Happy Composing!