A personalized, segmented email campaign is an important component in your personal branding strategy. Whether you’ve been creating email campaigns for years, or are about to embark on your first one, here are a few quick and easy tips from the experts at Marketing Sherpa/MecLabs, who recently delivered another great clinic–this one on crafting an engaging email message.
Engaging email messages
After showing recent optimization research findings, MecLabs experts used live audience submissions of emails and landing pages to illustrate how to improve copy and design in order to increase conversions by up top 85%.
Here are five techniques that can transform the effectiveness of your email campaign, drive leads and solidify your brand:
- Use Less Copy. Your customer should be able to read your entire email in less than 30 seconds. Anything longer and they will most likely lose interest.
- Include Fewer Calls to Action. There is an inverse relationship between the number of calls-to-action in your email or on your landing page and the number of conversions you’ll receive. One call-to-action reaped higher conversion rates than repeated calls-to-action and more than one type of call-to-action (ie: download whitepaper and register for webinar).
- Write a Natural Sounding Subject Line and Headline. Your subject line and headline should be comprised of words that would naturally come out of your mouth. A personal tone here is important.
- Make Your Email Look Like an Email. Your email shouldn’t look like a web page. The role of an email is simply to convey a brief message and drive the reader to a landing page. The more it looks like a web page, the more users click away.
- Make Your Email and Landing Page Look Different. Readers who click thru an email to find a landing page that looks and reads the same are more likely to click back to the email out of confusion, never to return.
In many of their clinics, the MecLab experts use the “asking a girl for a date” analogy to describe the email-landing page process: Your email is your introduction and “would you go out on a date with me” request. She says “yes”, or “clicks thru”, taking a chance on something unknown. You wouldn’t want to show up on her doorstep with a ring in hand, deed to a home and a 5-year family vacation schedule–just as you wouldn’t want your email reader to arrive at a landing page that requires a significant time commitment in reading extraneous copy and filling out long forms with personal information.
Brief, personal emails have a better chance of driving your reader to your landing page…succinct landing page content with quick and easy forms increases conversion rates. After that, asking for her hand in marriage is up to you…
