Email marketing is one of the most effective and affordable ways to reach your audience, generate leads, and increase sales. But how can you make sure your emails stand out from the clutter and deliver the results you want? In this article, you'll learn how to optimize your email design and copywriting for better ROI, using some simple tips and best practices.
Before you start designing and writing your email, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and who you want to target. Your goal and audience will influence every aspect of your email, from the subject line to the call to action. For example, if your goal is to get more sign-ups for your webinar, you need to craft a compelling value proposition and a clear urgency message for your prospects. If your goal is to nurture your existing customers, you need to provide them with relevant and helpful content that builds trust and loyalty.
Everything you send should have a goal or purpose. Oftentimes I see brands push content just for the sake of getting something out there. When there is no goal attached, it's useless!
Take a specific audience from point A to point B in their journey with your brand. If your goal doesn't have this level of specificity, go back to the drawing board.
Your email design should be responsive, meaning that it adapts to different screen sizes and devices. This will ensure that your email looks good and functions well on any platform, whether it's a desktop, a tablet, or a smartphone. A responsive design will also improve your deliverability, as some email clients may block or filter emails that are not mobile-friendly. To create a responsive design, you can use a pre-made template or a tool that generates HTML code for you. You should also keep your design simple and clean, using white space, contrast, and hierarchy to guide the reader's eye and attention.
The text base emails might have the highest roi. Why? You do not invest a lot of time and resources to create it. The great example is Sticker MUle company. The have the shortest text based emails which performs extremely well.
Testing on multiple devices is key. Don't forget about dark mode! You can even use a testing tool like Emails on Acid or similar.
Your email copy should be clear, engaging, and persuasive. It should match your tone and voice to your audience and goal, and use simple and concise language that avoids jargon and fluff. Your copy should also have a clear structure, with a catchy subject line, a captivating headline, a relevant body text, and a strong call to action. Your subject line should spark curiosity and interest, while your headline should summarize the main benefit or value of your email. Your body text should explain how your offer or content can help your reader solve a problem or achieve a goal, and provide social proof or testimonials if possible. Your call to action should be specific, visible, and action-oriented, telling your reader exactly what to do next.
Writing simply and uniquely is super underrated, especially nowadays where most copy is written by an AI model (like ChatGPT).
One of the worst things you can do in an email is to overwhelm your customer. The best messages have one, clear and direct call to action that is reinforced by clear and concise body copy. Depending on your niche, product price and customer base you may want to include social proof and customer testimonials. Also note that in an ideal world you're sending a message to an audience of 1. Over time your goal is to figure out the specific needs of each individual customer and speak directly to them.
Before you send your email to your entire list, you should test and optimize it for different variables and outcomes. You can use tools like Litmus or Email on Acid to check how your email looks and performs on different email clients and devices, and fix any issues or errors. You can also use tools like Mailchimp or AWeber to run A/B tests on different elements of your email, such as the subject line, the design, the copy, or the call to action. By testing and optimizing your email, you can improve your open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and ultimately, your ROI.
Finally, you should track and measure your results to see how your email performed and what you can improve for your next campaign. You can use metrics like open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and revenue per email to evaluate your email's effectiveness and impact. You can also use tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot to track your email's influence on your website traffic, leads, and sales. By tracking and measuring your results, you can learn from your successes and failures, and optimize your email marketing strategy for better ROI.
Email marketing is plagued with vanity metrics. Opens don't matter as much as they did 5 years ago and every year they continue to matter less. Apple's Privacy Policies continue to eat away at email open tracking. The metrics to measure are simple: - Clicks - Click Rate (measured as number of unique clicks / number of unique emails delivered) - Conversion Rate (measured as number of unique action completions / number of unique clicks) We can get fancier with attribution windows for indirect conversions but that's a whole other story. Keep it simple and make sure you're measuring each campaign you send to your customers.
Humanize emails Keep the design very minimal. Less fancy images and more focus on the content of the emails. You don't need fancy emails to engage people. Also research, tell us that the more we make emails design heavy, less people are interested in reading it. Messaging is the key Focus more on the problems you can solve for the reader than talking more about you. Emphasis on their problems and how you can solve for them is going to help engage and increase CTR. Provide more information on email itself rather than keeping enough for the clicks. Messaging should always be around what's in it for the reader. Scrub your database: It is very important that the database is scrubbed on a regular basis since the decay happens faster.