8 tips for creating marketing emails your customers can't help but click

Emails are a great way for marketers to connect with leads and customers. Not only do they have a higher reach than social media sites, they also afford marketers the chance to establish unique personal communication with an individual. However, unlike social media sites, where viewers can see your offer in an instant, emails are only effective if their recipients open and read through them. Hence, it's essential for marketers to ensure high open rates, and subsequently click-through rates, for their email marketing campaigns. Here are eight tips explaining how you can make this happen:

Send emails from a person, not your company

People are more likely to open emails sent from a real person as compared to ones sent by a company. If the email sender is a company, there are good chances that a recipient will dismiss it as spam without giving it a second glance. To avoid this and increase open rates, it’s a good practice to send emails from the company account of a person ([email protected]) rather than a generic company email id ([email protected]).

Subject line and preview text

The subject line should entice recipients into opening the email. Writing clear, concise, and understandable copy in the subject line is crucial for increasing open rates. You should avoid exclamations, capital letters, and spam trigger words (like ‘help’, ‘reminder’, ‘save’) in your subject lines. The preview text is also an important aspect for drafting emails with high open rates. Email clients, like Gmail and Outlook, take the first few lines from your email as the preview text by default. To give the recipients a better idea of what the email is about, you can set a different preview text that explains what's in it for them if they open the email.

Appealing design and clear CTA

Just like any form of marketing, emails should be visually appealing to viewers. Incorporating a clean and attractive design, with a detailed yet concise body of text, can do wonders for your click-through rate. Your email should also have a clear call-to-action which, when clicked, should lead the viewers to the specific page which features exactly what your email is offering. The CTA itself should bold and descriptive, giving recipients the chance to understand the purpose of the email even if they don't read its copy.

Get to the point

People will rarely read through marketing emails in detail. And if your email features a long text filled with unnecessary information, they will mostly lost interest before reaching the CTA button. Your email copy should be descriptive yet concise; stick to the purpose of the email and explain it in an engaging tone while using as few words as possible.

Optimise your email for mobile

Emails are viewed more on mobile than on any other platform. Despite this, few marketers optimise their emails to be mobile-friendly. Using email design templates specifically created for mobile viewing guarantees higher click-through rates. Optimising elements like images, which should be compressed to reduce file size, and CTA buttons, which should be large enough to be easily clickable, should also be considered while designing marketing emails.

Add alt tags to your images and CTA button

Not all email clients display images, and many people opt out of viewing images in the emails they receive. Alt tags, which are short descriptions that inform the viewer what the image is about, are essential for conveying information to such email recipients who otherwise can't view important elements like the CTA button.

Add social sharing and forwarding options

The chances of your link being clicked increase dramatically with the number of people who see it. Adding buttons for sharing on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter makes it easy for recipients to share your email with their friends. Adding a forwarding option with a ready-made template (which includes the subject and body so that a person can forward it with just a click) also increases the chances of more people viewing your email.

Take it slow

There's nothing worse for a brand than alienating its customers. A few businesses think it's prudent to send marketing emails every two-three days but all that does is irritate customers, who'll begin viewing every subsequent message from the company as spam. Limiting email communication to those times when it’s absolutely necessary improves your brand's credibility among customers, who will then be more likely to read the emails they receive from you.

Following these strategies will dramatically improve the success of your email marketing campaigns. If you employ some tips and tricks that aren't mentioned here, do share them in the comments below.