5 Ingredients to Improve Your Email Marketing Performance

Email marketing is challenging for many businesses.  There are several main reasons for this.  Attention spans are shorter, spam filters are tougher to crack and many will not open emails from people or businesses they do not already have a relationship with.

So how do you succeed in the face of these and other barriers? 

While there is no fool proof, one size fits all solution, below are five ingredients to help you increase your odds of hitting more often with email marketing campaigns.

The Ingredients

1. Compelling Subject Line
2. Easy to Digest Message
3. Call to Action
4. Ask Questions
5. Include a Link to Your Website

Subject Line

The subject line has to be compelling, like a headline in a newspaper.  Want to miss before you get started?  Simply use something that comes across as boring, dull or sounds like an advertisement in the subject line.  Seriously, no one will open the email and the resources spent to craft and send the email will have been wasted.  Worse, if you get marked as spam too many times, your future email efforts will be blocked by many systems.  Performance matters in a variety of ways when email marketing in bulk, for the current and future campaigns.

Grab attention and get opened.  If you are using a personal or interesting subject line than you have a much better shot of getting the recipient to click on the message and open it up.

Easy to Read

The composition of your email must keep a few things in mind.  First, less is more.  In most cases the fewer the words the better.  Also, try to keep individual paragraphs shorter too.  When you look at an email it should not require a user to scroll.  Why?  If it looks like it takes too much effort to read, many will not read it.  Better to send multiple emails in a campaign, then to try and squeeze it all in on one email that gets trashed without being read.

So the easier you make it to read, the better chance you have it will in fact be read.  Short and sweet, easy to understand emails perform the best.

Call to Action

Far too many emails lack clear call to action. If you capture the attention of your audience, but fail to lead them to the next step, you will not likely be happy with how they do not respond.  If you get them to open and read the email, make sure to tell them or ask them to do something in a clear manner.

Examples of this can include:

• Please click the link below to subscribe to our newsletter. 
• Enter our drawing for a chance to win
• Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest information
• Book your appointment by calling us
• Download and install our app for discounts

You might be amazed what a positive impact a clear call to action can have on the overall results of a email marketing campaign.

Ask Questions

Want to increase the odds of a response to your emails?  Do not forget to ask questions in the email.  Questions will encourage them to respond. Not only do questions encourage a response, they help to start a dialogue.  Once the dialogue is open, the road to rapport building is well under way.  Questions and the supplemental back and forth are key to mining new gold from email marketing efforts.

This is another great reason not to send emails from a “do not reply” email address.  Make sure you are using an email service that allows the clients and prospects to simply hit the reply button.  If you make things easy on your audience, the odds of victory are certainly better.

Website and Social Media Links

As obvious as this should be, many forget to include a link to their website and social media channels somewhere in the email. I suggest you have them both in the body of the email when appropriate and again in the signature at the conclusion of the email.

If you fail to provide the links, so a person can simply click and be transported, then you are doing yourself a major disservice.  To garner the best results, every email communication with prospects, clients and vendors, include the links to your major communication channels including your website, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and any other major social media platforms your business is active on.

Ingredients to Win

If you include all five of these ingredients on a regular basis in your email campaigns, you will have an increased shot at improving your overall performance.  As a bonus, when asking questions in your emails, do not forget to ask for referrals.  Referrals are free for people to give and can be a game changer for the business who gets them.  Best of luck to you as you embark on your future email marketing campaigns.