7 Elements Your Email Marketing Must Include

Picture this: You sit down to create an email to send out to your customers and realize your keyboard is sticky, so you get up to clean it. You sit down again, look at that flashing cursor and remember you haven’t responded to a text message, so you take care of that. You refocus again and find something else to distract yourself. Soon you only have 15 minutes left in the time you allotted to create and send an email, and you know that’s not enough time, so you sigh, and say you’ll try another time. Has that ever happened to you?

It happens to a lot of business owners. Every day, we are inundated with emails, and you don’t want to be the company that adds to your customers’ email chaos. Here’s the thing: your customers do want to hear from you. You just need to have a clear plan for what you’re sending and include some key elements in your email to optimize it for their reading. I’m sharing how to do that today so you can sit down and create emails like they’re going out of style.

1. Use a strong subject line – The subject line of your email is your chance to hook your reader and convince them to open the email. Make sure it’s relevant to the content inside and tells them what they’re going to get from reading your email. While you can be clever with how you say things, prioritize being clear over being cute.
2. Write in a conversational voice – Write the way you talk, the way you would write to a friend or family member.
3. Personalize the message – People love feeling special and appreciated, so make sure to personalize your email marketing campaigns whenever possible. This could mean including the recipient’s name in the subject line or body of the email, or it could mean targeting them with content that is specifically relevant to their needs and interests.
4. Give them helpful information – Your email marketing content should always provide value to your readers. This could mean giving them tips and advice, sharing useful insights, or offering exclusive discounts and special offers. Please don’t just send emails to send emails out. Your potential customers will appreciate that you are intentional in reaching out to them.
5. Use short words, sentences, and paragraphs – No one wants to read War and Peace in an email. By trying to sound smart and interesting with long words and sentences, we often sound dumb and dull. There is no reason to use big words or too many sentences. While the written and spoken word are different, reading your email out loud is a great way to test whether or not it is clear. Using big words, insider language, and complicated phrases is a great way to confuse your customers.
6. Make it easy to scan – Keep your email marketing content easy to scan by using headings, subheadings, and bullet points to organize your thoughts.
7. Tell them what to do – Your email marketing campaigns should always include clear and concise calls to action, so that readers know what you want them to do and how they can take advantage of your offers. If it’s a sales email, include a Call to Action button after every section. If it’s a nurture campaign email, add a reminder at the end of reminding your audience of your product or service and how they can do business with you.
8. Make it mobile-friendly – More and more people are accessing email content on their mobile devices, so make sure your email marketing campaigns are designed for optimal viewing on all screen sizes. Most email marketing systems like MailChimp and Constant Contact have this built into their systems, so be sure to review on mobile to make sure everything looks good on a mobile device.
9. Include a PS – People spend about 15 seconds scanning emails and they always jump to the PS if you have one. In your PS, include a reminder of what they need to do to take action, add a bonus tip to the content you’ve already written, share a limited special offer, or give them a sneak preview into something that’s coming.

Email marketing campaigns should always be creative, engaging, and informative in order to be successful. By using a mix of the ten tips provided in this article, you can create an email marketing campaign that will resonate with your subscribers and encourage them to take action. You will no longer dread sitting down to write an email because you’ll feel confident about the emails you’re sending out.

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If you need help coming up with a plan for your content, we can help you create a marketing playbook. Schedule a call now to get a clear plan for marketing success.