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Remember, “You’ve got mail”?
I got my first emails way back in the late 90s when I owned a book distributing and publishing company. Back then, receiving an email was cool. It often meant an order or an author offering a new manuscript idea. Or friends forwarding a joke they knew I’d like.
Times have changed. Now, email can be a nuisance. People do everything they can to delete it. In fact, isn’t your purpose when you get to your daily emails to delete them, not to even open them?
I’ve gotten myself buried in emails, too. I love free white papers and reports about content marketing. But it turns out they’re not actually free. I get the report in return for my email. That adds up to a lot of emails that I scan to delete. (I've got to unsubscribe to some of these!)
So, if you're using emails to get clients, how do you get them opened and clicked thru to your website? Marketing Experiments tested some standard email principles, and here’s what they found.
Emails Optimized for Click Thru Rates Had the Following Characteristics
1) Meaningful Engagement
Since people’s first reaction when receiving emails is to delete them, the subject of the email must be consequential to them. You have to know your audience and give them a powerful, helpful, “can’t live without it” reason to open your email.
So make your subject line, headline, and image (if you have one) completely and totally relevant to the benefit you’re offering your email recipient. No dull headlines, no meaningless, generic images.
Remember that email started out as a personal communication medium between friends and colleagues. (Actually, that’s how people first used the internet, too.) Make your pitch personal. Salesy turns your recipient off.
2) Visual Simplification
People scan emails, they don’t “read” them. Make the eye path simple. Place multiple features/benefits into bullets. Break up paragraphs. Keep the text to one idea, don’t try to throw in more than that. Avoid the “since you’ve already got them there anyways” temptation to overload the recipient with too much info.
3) Sequenced Movement
The idea of a sales email is to get a click to your website and/or landing page. And that’s it. You’re usually not selling anything more than a click in your email. So, when it comes to your call to action, Shop Now or Buy Now might strike your visitor as too abrupt.
Try instead of Shop Now, View Details. Instead of Get Started, try See How It Works. Or in place of Subscribe & Save try View Subscription Options.
Notice how the second option above is more a continuation of the conversation than a face-to-face “are you ready to buy?” That’s the natural sequence of a personal, one-on-one email that is less likely to get deleted.
The purpose of email is to establish and then reinforce a relationship with your audience. You’ll increase your rate of clicks through to your website if you optimize your emails to reflect this visitor-centric relationship.
Until next time,
Nick
Another similar post you might find helpful:
What Do Organic Search and Email Have in Common?
Nick Burns is an SEO Web writer specializing in persuasive copywriting and content marketing. He provides clients a winning online strategy plus the content writing to make it work. You can contact Nick here.
