Email marketing is an effective way to market your products, services, and information to your audience. But, it can be easy to confuse your readers to the point that they do not take action. If you want to improve conversions, consider the following.
Know Your Audience
The best thing you can do for your business is to understand your audience backward and forwards. The more you know who youíre crafting emails for, the better you can word everything to get the response you want.
Craft Subject Lines That Create Curiosity
Your first line of defense is the subject line of your email. If your subject line doesnít make the reader curious enough to open the email to read the rest, nothing else matters.
Create Attention-Grabbing Headlines
When someone opens an email, the headline is the first thing they will see after the subject line that enticed them to open the email in the first place. If this doesnít grab their attention, they probably wonít continue reading.
Use Bulleted Information
Inside the email message, be sure to make the information easy to absorb. One way to do this is to use bulleted information and lists. People read online differently than they read a book. They read vertically instead of horizontally; therefore, make the information match where the eye goes.
Have One Focus per Email
Instead of giving too much information and many options for purchasing something, make your email focused on one item and one offer. You can always upsell and cross-sell at the point of checkout but for the purposes of the email, make the focus on one thing only.
Provide One Link per Email
Don’t overwhelm your audience with ten links to different items in your emails. Instead, provide one link for the focused information that you want to get across to your audience. One link gives them one thing to do.
Know Your Specific Call to Action
If you can identify the one thing you want your audience to do after reading your email then it will be easier for you to design the subject line, headline, and email to match.
Keep It Short and Simple
Super long emails donít translate well because most people just want to know what the point is and move on from the email. Take out extraneous words and get to the point in your emails for faster action.
Understanding that you can increase conversions by being more focused in each email that you send doesnít mean you canít promote more than one item in your email messages. However, focusing each message on one promotion will get you further than too many promotions in one email. The reason is that you avoid confusion and increase conversions by telling your audience about one offer at a time.
Doug says
Are you aware of a program (app) that scores the words you use in the subject line of an email? It rates your likelihood of capturing attention.
Paul says
We discussed a few of these in the WordPress Inner-Circle Academy a few weeks ago. One such tool is over at Email Subject Line Grader.