Stephanie Donelson

School may be out for summer but that doesn’t mean we have to stop learning new techniques to use in our marketing campaigns or take inspiration from other successful strategies.

Email marketing is an evolving tactic and one that always teaches us something new and offers different variables to test to find the perfect formula for strong open rates, click-through rates, and subscription growth. 

Let’s talk about five opportunities to enhance your email marketing strategy this summer so you’re prepped and ready to go in the fall.

5 opportunities to improve your emails

1. Move CTAs above the fold

Look at your last email campaign on a mobile device. Is your CTA above the fold? Mobile gives us such little real estate and in an era where we have to get action items in front of customers ASAP, we need to rethink CTA positioning.

Many marketers are moving toward adding a button overlay on the header photo and having a second button below the introductory copy to make sure customers don’t miss it. This approach really requires some thought into your color choices to make sure your CTA button looks good on top of imagery and has enough oomph to stand out on its own.

2. Create a welcome campaign with a real-life element

I don’t know about you, but I get overwhelmed when I look at the promotions tab in Gmail. I’d rather walk to my mailbox and sort through paper mail than have to open the 100+ promotional emails I get each day, and I get super excited when brands I use send me stuff in the mail. 

Bring your emails to life with a real-life element tied to your campaigns that arrives in the mailbox not the inbox. This can work really well with welcome campaigns. Wag! does this well by sending you the lockbox in the mail to welcome you to their program. Yes, I know you need the lockbox to use the service, but you can still take this idea and adapt it your brand’s needs. 

Another example is Go Ahead Tours. My husband and I did a trip to Europe with them and before we went they sent us a travel kit that had luggage tags, our itinerary, and even a complimentary cookbook of recipes from around the world! It was themed, timely, and supremely relevant, meaning a good experience with the brand in my mind. 

Here are some ideas to get the brainstorm started:

• You have a gourmet coffee delivery service, send them a branded mug or thermos at the end of the welcome series 
• You run a fitness studio, new members get a free water bottle or trophy for sticking with it for three months
• You ran a paid webinar series on how to improve productivity in offices, send subscribers a timer or clock so they can better manage their time or a daily planner to prioritize their tasks

3. Deliver free content

Like the point above, we all like getting free stuff. But that doesn’t always have to be free products, it could be free cheat sheets, guides, or anything they can download. With each email in a drip campaign, be sure to direct the recipient to something A) they want, and B) is related to what they initially contacted you about.

For example, I stopped at Marketo’s table at the Digital Summit Denver and now I’m getting emails with guides and ebooks all related to content marketing – which I love! It’s a great way to build a relationship with me and show me the value their brand provides. 

Free content helps guide them down the path to purchase, or if you send them content after their trial has ended, it keeps your name top of mind and reminds them why they should buy your service or why they need to get on the phone with you to get their questions answered. 

4. Rework re-engagement campaigns 

I mentioned earlier that I get way, way too many promotional emails and so a lot of them I start to ignore or delete as soon as they hit my inbox. Then, I’ll get the magical re-engagement email where the brand is asking what they did wrong, if I’m still interested, or what they can do to win my business back. 

Like responding to reviews, brands have to come across as human in re-engagement campaigns. Tap into your subscriber’s emotions, loneliness and FOMO work well here, ask what you can do to keep them engaged, tell them how you’ve changed while they weren’t interacting with your brand, or let them know what they might have missed out on by not opening your emails.

Use emotional language to evoke a response from the subscriber. Here are some words to play around with in your re-engagement email campaigns or subject lines:

• We miss you
• We’ve noticed you’re not opening our emails
• We haven’t seen you in a while
• Hey, stranger
• Don’t forget about us
• Do you need space?
• Are we breaking up?
• We thought we had something special going on
• We can make this work
• Remember when you signed up?
• Did we get it right?
• We would hate to miss your anniversary
• We’re sorry to see you go
• Come back to us

Another option is to offer them a deal or discount to easily and quickly win back their loyalty. As soon as I see more than 40% off in a subject line, that email is opened!

5. Newsletter refresh

Once you’ve polished your re-engagement campaigns, it’s time to take a closer look at your newsletter – or think about creating one! 

More brands are moving away from graphic-heavy newsletters to text-heavy and streamlined designs with hyperlinked text instead of buttons. It’s like 1999 in your inbox!

Obviously, different styles work for different brands and different customers. When I worked in travel, I’d definitely keep up the use of images, GIFs, or video embeds as images are powerful for helping customers book travel, but if I were to create an email newsletter for my marketing blog, I’d probably go the route of keeping it light on images and focus more on text. 

Run a test of your newsletter, one with images and one without, and see how your click-through rate differs and which style your audience prefers.

You could even put up screenshots of the newsletters side-by-side on social media and open a poll about what style they like. You don’t have to go into this blind and hope for the best, you can ask for feedback from the people who will ultimately be engaging with your emails. 

Remember, email marketing is always changing and adapting to user behavior. Never be afraid of running tests or allowing your subscribers to chime in on what they want to achieve better email marketing results. 

Which of these five email upgrades will you be starting with? Tell me in the comments below or on Twitter at @sjdonelson303!