- Know your target
You need to understand your clientele to provide useful content. So who is your target?
As indicated by the study published by OptinMonster, it’s crucial to understand your audience. The manner in which you present an offer to new customers in an effort to guide them through your sales funnel will differ from how you communicate it to existing customers for repeat business. Preemptively comprehending your audience enables you to craft emails that are more impactful and effective.
Well, a target audience is a specific group of online customers most likely to want your products or service. Thus you should appreciate your target audience and customer base.
To do so, you have to gather and analyze sufficient data about their problems and learn about which products and suppliers address these issues.
These data will include gender and location. Interests, age, and income also play vital roles in allocating target group needs.
Once you have these, you can draft promotional emails talking about their problems and how you could resolve them. You could include what inspires them.
When you know their goals and needs, you can tailor your products and services to offer suitable solutions.
Thus target audience forms a significant role in how you structure your promotional emails.
- Set an objective and CTA
Once you have identified your target audience what do you do? Well, you craft the main objective of reaching them.
What are you trying to promote? How will the products help alleviate customers’ pain? Why is your product or service superior to that offered by the competition?
Your promotion email should answer these and many other pertinent issues comprehensively. Indeed, you are trying to convince strangers that you can help.
As reported in the Campaign Monitor study, it is advisable for promotional emails to proactively address potential customer inquiries. These could include questions like, “How will the products address customers’ concerns?” and other queries that may arise. It’s essential to thoroughly answer all of their questions to ensure effective communication.
Once they get hooked up what happens? Your email should set these steps well in advance.
Start with your end goal and lay a clear path to reach the call to action. But know that not all CTA culminates into sales.
And even if this is the ultimate objective, not all readers would take this step initially. So what do you do?
You can prompt the subscribers to forward and share exciting content. Next, you can persuade the subscribers to visit your website for additional blogs and content that may resonate with their unique requirements.
Still, you can convince them to fill in the subscription form or set up a meeting. All these are done to eventually expand your target list and to gather intelligence about their unique preference.
- Use simple email
People are busy and don’t want to be bombarded by complicated articles. Still, smartphones are narrow, hence any typed document has to be well-spaced and simple to sustain interest.
So, when you are drafting a promotional email, your email format and structure should be simple. A typical promotional email should have a pre-header text, a header, and a greeting to the recipients.
Afterward, the main body of the mail follows the above. It’s also segmented into a sales funnel while addressing the potential clients’ lifestyles.
Lastly, you should include CTA and even a signup prompt.
Readers always prefer a simple email structure. So use heading styles and incorporate bullet points for a concise presentation.
Referring to insights from the Marketing Tutor study, simplicity is key when crafting promotional emails. In your email composition, ensure to incorporate pre-header text, a header, and a recipient greeting. Integrating a clear call-to-action (CTA) is essential, given readers’ preference for a straightforward style. Utilize distinct heading styles and employ bullet points for a concise and effective presentation.
Still, you can shorten the paragraphs so that three is much pause in reading. Besides, spacing between the paragraphs is essential. This ensures that the eyes aren’t strained even when reading from smartphones.
It also makes for an interesting read.
- Subject line
Readers only open a mail with striking headers. After all, the first impression matters.
Thus the subject line should stand out to entice a mail recipient to click on it. When the mail has the customer’s name, it’s personalized, and the recipient feels valued.
Even with the personal touch naming brings the content matters. Nobody will waste their time reading irrelevant content which adds no value to their lives.
To maintain seriousness, avoid using free, sales, and extra. These are sassy and would appear promotional, and hence spammy.
Using excessive punctuation and all caps is not recommended either. Or else your article would appear sensational and hence out of touch.
Just write matter-of-factly, without appearing to be overtly persuasive. But provide facts and quote reputable sources to further authenticate your product’s effectiveness in addressing their real concerns.
- Test data
Once you complete the drafting of your mail, you should thoroughly test it before sending it out. Remember that you’ll use different email disbursement platforms. Still, recipients have different devices.
The most popular email providers are Google, Yahoo, and Hotmail. Besides, various devices feature different operating systems.
Thus there is no flat platform fitting all the users. And so your emails must try to accommodate all these variations, otherwise, they wouldn’t be delivered to your subscribers and potential recipients.
To ensure you don’t run into such issues, test your emails by running them in different providers using various devices with all popular OSs.
Not all your subscribers have a wide bandwidth. So have documents written in HTML and plain-text versions to accommodate those readers with limited wi-Fi.
Test also for typo errors and grammar, which tend to cheapen your otherwise well-researched content. After making corrections, send and check for engagement matrices.
Continue running tests like A/B split email delivery analytics.
