Email Marketing Involves Careful Planning
Knowing your audience is crucial when writing a marketing email because it allows you to create content that resonates with their specific interests, needs, and behaviors. By understanding your audience, you can tailor your message to address their pain points, provide relevant solutions, and use a tone that appeals to them personally. This personalized approach not only increases engagement and open rates but also builds trust and loyalty, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates and stronger customer relationships.
Effective planning should include:
Segmentation
Divide your email list into segments based on demographics, behavior, and past interactions. For instance, an event invitation for a Red Sox game may have a more casual tone directed toward students than toward prospective donors.
Timing
Think about the best time to send an email when the open rates may be higher. For example, an important employee news communication might be sent shortly after work hours begin but an invitation to a social event might be best sent during lunch when a recipient is browsing personal emails.
Call To Action (CTAs)
A call to action (CTA) is crucial in an email because it guides recipients toward the desired response, whether it's making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a resource. Effective CTAs should be clear, compelling, and action-oriented, using strong verbs like "Register for the Webinar," "Subscribe To Newsletter," or "Contact HR For Details." They should stand out visually, often as buttons or links, and be placed prominently within the email. Additionally, creating a sense of urgency, such as "Register by May 15," can encourage immediate action.
An effective CTA transforms passive reading into active engagement, driving conversions and achieving marketing goals.
Pro-Tip: Personalize your Emails
Personalizing the recipient's name and content in an email marketing campaign significantly boosts open rates by making recipients feel recognized and valued. When emails address individuals by name and offer content tailored to their preferences or past behaviors, it creates a sense of relevance and personal connection. This personalized touch captures attention and encourages recipients to engage with the email, leading to higher open rates and more effective communication. In essence, personalization transforms a generic message into a targeted, meaningful interaction, fostering stronger relationships and driving better campaign performance.
Write For Your Audience
Email marketing newsletters and other communications should be clear and concise, ensuring that recipients can quickly grasp the key message. A well-defined value proposition should be highlighted, explaining the benefit or unique offer to the reader. Including a strong, visible call to action (CTA) directs recipients on the next steps, whether it's to make a purchase, sign up for an event, or explore more content. This straightforward approach respects the reader's time, enhances engagement, and increases the likelihood of achieving the desired response.
Other writing tips include:
- A subject line should be short (under 50 characters) and to the point. Consider personalizing your subject field, if possible.
- Use time-sensitive language to encourage immediate action.
- Hook the reader with a strong opening line that grabs attention.
- Avoid spam triggers, including excessive punctuation, all caps, and spam words like "free," "urgent," "Click here," or "act now."
- Keep paragraphs short and use bullet points for easy readability.
- Use a tone that reflects our UMass branding style.
- Offer additional value if relevant, such as tips, tutorials, and insights.
Editing and Testing Your Emails
Email marketing is an essential tool to communicate with employees, students, and UMass constituents. Any and all email communications are a reflection on our brand and our commitment to educating the citizens of Massachusetts and beyond. Before sending out your email, test the following:
Spelling and Grammar
Read through the email out loud and run it through a spell and grammar check. We recommend have another employee or more also read the email in advance to give you feedback.
Digital Accessibility
The university takes pride in our commitment to digital accessibility. Be sure that any images have alt text included so that recipients who use screen readers will know the images in the email and hyperlink URLs from the email text itself - never use the full URL as a screen reader will read each letter of a URL. For more on digital accessibility, see our guide here.
Test Emails on Multiple Devices
Before sending out a large communication, test the email in Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and other clients. Also, test the email on desktop and mobile devices.
Test Subject Lines
Some email marketing platforms allow you to test open rates based on subject lines. Consider doing so to increase open rates.
The Importance of Marketing vs Transactional Emails
The CAN-SPAM Act sets the rules for commercial email, establishing requirements to protect recipients from spam and ensuring transparent and responsible marketing practices. Marketing emails must include a clear and honest subject line, the sender's physical address, an option to unsubscribe, and must not contain misleading information. In contrast, transactional emails, which are sent to facilitate an agreed-upon transaction or provide updates on an ongoing business relationship, are exempt from these requirements. Transactional emails focus on delivering essential information, such as order confirmations, account updates or internal communications to employees, do not primarily aim to promote products or services.
Understanding these distinctions helps businesses comply with regulations while effectively communicating with their audience.
Understand Your Analytics
Take time to analyze your post send analytics. Is your open rate too low? That could be a sign that there may have been a problem with the email. The benefits of good analytics are numberous:
- Measure Effectiveness: Understand how well your email campaign performed in terms of open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
- Audience Insights: Gain insights into your audience's preferences and behavior, such as which subject lines and content types resonate most.
- Optimization: Identify areas for improvement and refine future campaigns for better engagement and results.
- ROI Calculation: Determine the return on investment (ROI) by comparing the campaign's cost to the revenue generated.
- Segmentation: Tailor future emails to different segments of your audience based on their interaction with past emails.
- Content Relevance: Ensure the content you're providing is relevant and valuable to your subscribers, reducing unsubscribe rates.
- Identify Issues: Spot and address issues such as low delivery rates or high bounce rates, ensuring your emails reach the intended audience.
- Benchmarking: Compare the performance of different campaigns to establish benchmarks and set realistic goals.
- A/B Testing: Evaluate the results of A/B tests to determine the most effective elements of your emails.
- Compliance: Ensure compliance with email marketing regulations by monitoring metrics like unsubscribe rates and spam complaints.
Email Marketing Support
The UITS Digital Experience (DX) team can support your email marketing efforts and train you how to use the email marketing platform.