Email marketing campaigns design two types of promotional materials: the email itself and the lead page on the website. The lead page allows customers to do what they want to do (such as purchase a product, register for a webinar, etc.) after clicking the call to action in the email. You can find a wealth of materials on some professional websites to help you better create emails and lead pages to maximize your ability to acquire potential customers and convert them into actual sales. eMarketer and Marketing Sherpa are two good professional websites where you can find advice and techniques related to creating emails and lead pages. Of course, you can also hire a professional creative person or consultant to create emails and lead pages. When designing emails and lead pages, a graphic designer will give you a lot of advice and provide you with a lot of technical support to make the promotional materials have a better chance of getting a positive response from the email recipients.
1. Create emails
When creating email promotional materials, you need to consider the following aspects.
(1) HTML and text
You need to create two versions of the email: one HTML version and one plain text version. Some email readers will not reply to HTML versions of emails, but will reply to text versions of emails. This is especially true on mobile devices, where email programs often offer the option to display only plain text.
You can design email collateral in HTML (HTML 4.01 is the only universal language that can be read by all email and web clients). You can learn more about creating email collateral by downloading a free white paper from the Internet Advertising Agency’s website.
(2) Subject
For tips on writing email subjects, see Task 2 of this project.
(3) “From” Field
When identifying yourself in an email, be as forthright, legitimate, and promote your brand values as possible. It’s a good idea to include your company or brand name in this field, as well as the name of your product. You might be tempted to include your CEO in the From field, but that should only be done if the CEO is well-known.
(4) Text and Images
You want to have some text in your email, but not too much. People don’t like to read large amounts of text in email. You only need to use a few simple sentences to clearly express the main information, such as telling the other party the value of your product or service and how favorable the price you offer is. In addition, you also need to show your identity, that is, your brand is a legitimate brand. Similarly, customers will not like emails loaded with too many images, especially when you do not attach enough text to fully explain your product. The best ratio is 70% text and 30% images (see Figure 6-10). In addition, the spam filter of the Internet service provider will filter emails full of images, so that the emails cannot enter the recipient’s email box.
(5) Brand
Be good at using your trademark and brand, and ensure that the brand is well displayed in the email. In this way, even if the recipient does not become your customer through the email, your brand awareness will still be improved.
(6) Call to Action
The main purpose of email marketing is to trigger the recipient’s click action. In an email, the key element that can maximize this attention behavior is the CTA (Call to Action) button, that is, the call to action button. What do you want the recipients to do after reading the email? Do you want them to go to the guide page, buy your product, or participate in online market research?
You need to come up with a strong call to action that targets the behavioral feedback you expect, such as “Register your account now!” “Buy now and get 15% off!”. A more urgent call to action can prompt the recipient to take action immediately after reading the email.