Step Five: Create Appealing Emails
The first email your subscribers receive from you should welcome them and thank them for joining your email list. This may be an automated response that is sent after a subscriber submits the online subscription form. It is important for your welcome message to have all of your corporate branding in place and it should reiterate the mailing schedule, offer clear contact and unsubscribe information, and inform the subscribers on all of the benefits they will receive from their subscription. To learn other best practice methods, please read Listrak’s white paper Getting the Most from your Welcome Message.
Ongoing campaigns must address topics that are relevant to your subscribers. Address them with a personal tone, deliver timely information, and compose articles that are easy to read on a computer or handheld screen with short sentences and paragraphs. Make your key points immediately in your first paragraph, later expounding on these in more detail. Keep content brief and concise, using a service-oriented tone-of-voice to positively represent your company and brand.
Include a compelling subject line to attract the attention of your subscribers, and integrate specific calls-to-action throughout your emails so readers can easily click through to purchase products or find more information. You can include multiple links to each product or landing page. Encourage word-of-mouth marketing by including a send-to-a-friend link, and be sure to include links so subscribers may opt-in to other email campaigns offered by your company. To learn more, please read Listrak’s white paper How to Make your Email Campaigns more Relevant.
It is important to keep design elements consistent. Use colors and fonts that complement your brand and corporate colors. Repetitive brand saturation gives your company a personality, with stronger brand recognition improving consumer trust. Soft, light-colored backgrounds are most favorable for on-screen reading, with dark blue, grey or black body text. If you are formatting the campaigns in text only, use spaces to create a natural break in the text. This will make the email easier to read.
If you are formatting the campaigns in HTML, integrate appropriate pictures and be sure that they are embedded properly so the format remains intact. Simply copying and pasting a graphic into your email will not work. Graphics must reside on the Internet and the email must have an embedded link to the image URL in order to appear in the recipients’ inboxes. Many email service providers, like Listrak, offer a media library that allows you to upload graphics files to an online repository so you may easily add images to your campaigns with the confidence that they are properly embedded.
In order to keep a consistent look across multiple campaigns, you should consider building a template library. That way, templates only have to be created once and may be reused throughout many campaigns.