If you really want to add power to your email campaign, while increasing response, there are a few simple tips to follow which will increase your reader’s sense of interest and your click-through rate, thus increasing the number of leads generated or sales made.
Give your letters a human feel and personal touch. Otherwise, they look mass produced and no-one feels special reading a mass-produced piece. For the same reason, avoid flash. Flashy pieces say “mass-marketing”, while simple pieces feel more individual. After all, if you sat down to write an individual letter to your granny, would you put a flashing banner ad at the top, with 10 different font colors and sizes throughout, trying to grab her attention? Not likely. So keep it simple.
Having said that though, you will want to avoid your pieces appearing boring and bland. You do need to hold the reader’s interest, after all. To do this, add an occasional change in font size or color. Or break up your piece with bullet points. Play around with design by changing your margins or centering your text. Just remember rule number 1 (to keep it simple, rather than screaming) and use design changes sparingly.
If you know your reader’s name, use it. Nothing personalizes a letter like using the reader’s name. But again, do it sparingly. Overuse is not only annoying but again, the letter tends to take on the feel of an auto-produced, mass-market piece. If your reader feels like they are part of a small select group of recipients, they are more likely to respond to your offer.
There are two schools of thought regarding length. Some say the longer the letter, the longer you can hold the reader’s attention and the more likely they are to click through to your offer. This may be true until the point the reader decides he is way too busy to read all the way through that HUGE and cluttered mountain of words and just clicks the delete button.
The second school of thought says to keep it short and sweet – no more than a sentence or two. For example, yesterday I received a marketing email that said simply, “click here to read a letter I wrote” and then it had a link. That was it. Nothing more. Now it’s possible in some cases, this might pique a reader’s curiosity, but for me, it’s not enough. Sadly for the writer, I deleted the email without clicking through. I mean, why would care if he wrote a letter, much less want to read it?! You have to give me some reason to care. What is the subject matter of the letter he wrote? Is it a subject I care deeply about? Is it something that will solve a problem I have? In other words, give me a reason to click through!
The point of your email letter campaign is to keep your reader attentively engaged in what you have to say just long enough to get them to click through to your offer. So with that in mind, keep your piece as long as it needs to be but no longer and by all means keep it straight to the point. Any superfluous fluff not only adds length to the piece, risking the loss of interest but also gets the reader off track, decreasing click-through rate.
Devise a subject line that captures interest. You’ll want to get your reader to open the email in the first place, right? If your subject line gets the reader curious, they’ll want to open the email to find out more. Using the above example, if my subject line says something like “see the letter I wrote”, unless this email came from your sister, and especially if it is a stranger, you are most likely to delete it and may possibly take the extra initiative to add them to your junk/spam filter. Not what you want as a writer. If your subject line captivates the reader, they’ll want to find out more. So, for example, if your subject line reads, “The number one way to get your teenager to communicate with you”, your reader is going think, “Now that’s something I want to know more about!” They won’t be able to open your email fast enough!
Consider the use of graphics. A single well-placed photo or drawing is just enough to capture the reader’s interest, but not so much that it makes the letter look mass-produced or too busy.
Include a call to action! All marketing pieces, be it your website, a flyer, an article, a paid-for ad, etc, should always contain a call to action. What is it you wish the reader to do as a result of reading your piece? Click on the link? Buy your product? Call you? What? Do not leave the reader with any doubt as to what you wish them to do.
By incorporating these few simple rules into your email campaign, you should see a large jump in your click through rate, and assuming you have a strong landing page on the other side of the click, hopefully also see an increase in your uptake, as well. Happy emailing!
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
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