The holiday season is all about spending time with family, experiencing the joy of giving and receiving presents, and, most importantly, all of the great food you can’t help but indulge in. Since our friends to the south are heading toward their Thanksgiving, and Christmas is right around the corner for everyone, there’s no time like the present to spend some time whipping up the perfect email marketing recipe for success. This way, after you’ve enjoyed the fine offerings of the holiday season, you’ll have all the ingredients you need to build a winning approach to connecting in the inbox that stretches well beyond the New Year.
The Right Foundation
Before jumping into any other part of the recipe, it’s important to start with the right “cookbook.” As Vikas Lalwani of Entrepreneur explains, in the world of email marketing, this means coming up with a strong objective that helps guide and direct your outreach initiative from start to finish. Whether your goal focuses on boosting site traffic via email marketing or building and maintaining a healthy subscriber list that you can rely on far into the future, having a solid foundation for your campaign helps streamline the process and improve the overall efficiency of your operations.
A Strong Subject Line
Once you have a strong objective helping shape your campaign, it’s time to jump into the first bite of the email marketing process – the always important subject line. To find the right subject line, Lalwani goes on to suggest spending some time looking at your email content from the point of view of your subscribers. By embodying this mindset, you can key in on what piques the interest of these viewers and start testing potential offerings from this vantage point. Considering that Lalwani reports 47 percent of readers decide whether or not to read an email based on the subject line alone, there’s nothing wrong with pointing in some serious effort perfecting this portion of the recipe.
Appealing Body Content
As far as the content of your message goes, the experts at Business 2 Community point out that you can’t go wrong with placing an emphasis on personalization and value. By tailoring your message to each reader with the information garnered via your contact list sign-up sheet, your brand can develop a unique and engaging experience that stands out in a cluttered inbox. Adding in that shoppers are always looking for a good deal stands as plenty of reason to provide valuable promotions when building your stable of great email messages.
Enticing Email Layouts
Of course, enticing text content doesn’t go over so well if it’s wrapped up in a boring or confusing package that’s hard to read. For this reason, one of the most important facets of the successful email marketing recipe hones in on your email design and layouts. By developing ascetically appealing presentations that help promote your message and keep the reader’s eyes flowing to your call-to-action (CTA), these emails can pack a dynamic one-two punch of content and visuals that is sure to knock your inbox audience off of its collective feet. Just be sure to spend some time delving into the arena of mobile and responsive design as well. Otherwise, you run the risk of alienating a large portion of your targeted demographic with unwieldy selections that don’t render properly on these devices.
The Secret Ingredient
The final ingredient that goes into the recipe for a stellar inbox initiative actually doesn’t have a spot in your email content at all. Instead, Carolina Di Pietro, also part of the Business 2 Community team of industry experts, recommends that any brand serious about making a splash via email marketing and other digital outreach programs spend some time sprucing up its landing pages. The main reason for this “secret ingredient” comes from the fact that many organizations develop great inbox content, but let numerous conversions slip through the cracks thanks to a substandard on-site experience.To avoid this unwanted outcome, don’t be afraid to redesign and streamline your stable of landing pages. Whether you revamp your visuals and content, or implement a more interactive digital design, spending some time bringing this gateway to your online storefront into the modern era can help your brand better accommodate desktop and on-the-go shoppers. Naturally, this isn’t a process that happens in the blink of an eye, but seeing the boost in site traffic and conversions that come from complimentary landing pages is more than enough motivation for brands looking to whip up an email marketing recipe that puts the competition to shame this holiday season.
