5 Tips for Successful Email Marketing

You might think that email marketing has had its day. In an era of total information overload when all our inboxes are overflowing and we unsubscribe from anything that feels irrelevant, could it even be counter-productive to approach potential leads via email?

In our our experience, that’s not the case. And according to Hubspot, 86% of professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes. Email works well as a way of making contact with a targeted list of potential high-value leads and opening doors to more in-depth sales conversations further down the line. Your challenge is to get into your potential clients’ worlds, and understand their goals and the issues affecting them as well as possible. A well-worded email introduction can be a simple but highly effective way of getting the ball rolling.

We think email marketing remains a useful part of your sales tool kit, provided you approach it in the right way. 

Here are our five tips for email marketing that opens doors

1. Interest and intrigue

Getting your email opened is the first hurdle. Many of us don’t open anything that we aren’t obliged to respond to, so there needs to be a very good reason to open an email from someone you don’t know. Good subject lines tend to either demonstrate clearly what’s in it for me or provoke curiosity. Or both. Short headlines are best, 55% of emails are opened on mobiles these days and a long subject line will get lost. With that in mind, 82% of marketers use 60 characters or less in subject lines, according to analysis of email marketing data from 2019.

2. Brevity

Whatever you’re sending, keep it short. Opening an unsolicited email and being greeted by an essay will most likely get the email sent to trash before the reader’s got past the first line. Keep it short, and make it clear what you’d like them to do. One simple call to action – be that ‘arrange a time to talk’, or ‘come to our event’ is enough.

3. Homework

If you are approaching someone who doesn’t know you or your business, you’ll need to quickly establish some credibility. And the best way to do that isn’t to launch into your own back story, but to demonstrate that you’ve done your homework on them. Showing how you’ve helped people in similar situations with similar challenges to the one you believe they’re facing is a way of establishing relevance and credibility. Include very specific details where possible to show you know what’s happening in their world.

4. Respectful

Tailored and personal is key, but over familiarity can be a turn off. Your email will most likely be read in a stream of emails from people the recipient does know, so fake friendliness will strike the wrong note. Sensationalist language, business buzzwords or packing in too many exclamation marks can turn readers off, so stick to professional friendliness.

5. Naked

Not an attempt to get you to jump straight to point 5, but a suggestion that you strip your emails back to the absolute basics. No images, no attachments, no fancy visuals. Sticking to plain text increases the odds of your email getting through and getting opened. And it also increases the chances of it getting kept, or getting forwarded internally within the company.

And that’s the beauty of email marketing. A well-written introduction to your business that demonstrates credibility and relevance can be circulated, upwards, downwards and sideways, accruing a level of authority or perceived endorsement along the way. Make it valuable and helpful, and your marketing email has a long shelf life.