There are few places on the Internet as personal as your inbox. This is exactly why, if you you send newsletters or email marketing campaigns, you should ensure you’re satisfying the needs of your subscribers. Similar to dating, impress them and you may win their hearts! (Or rather clicks and conversions)
What are the needs of the subscriber?
Like in the Maslow’s pyramid of needs, let’s start with the basics and discuss the tiers starting from the bottom of the hierarchy upwards.
1. Respectful
Everything starts with the respect - to your subscribers and to the law. Good email marketing begins with building the lists in a lawful way - whether it’s GDRP, CAN-SPAM or any other legislation relevant in your jurisdiction.
Never send emails to people who haven’t asked for them. (e.g. by subscribing to your newsletters directly or by accepting marketing preferences from the terms and conditions of your product or service)
Make sure you add an easy way of unsubscribing in every campaign you send. Also avoid dark UX patterns. Don’t make the opt-out process unnecessarily difficult. An example of a dark pattern would be requiring your subscriber to type their email address after clicking the opt-out link, making the opt-out link invisible in the email message Sendeo is an email marketing software that has good defaults, will be respectful to your subscribers and abide the relevant laws.
As a sidenote, but it’s important to remember, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a resolution introduced by the European Union but it affects all EU citizens, no matter what their country of residence is. If any of your subscribers are EU or EEA citizens, you need to adhere to that law.
Another side of the lowest hierarchy tier is integrity. The rule is very simple - if you promise something, make sure you deliver. Avoid clickbait subject lines, they may improve the email open rate but your recipients will feel cheated, may unsubscribe and definitely won’t convert.
2. Functional
While simple in principle, it’s very easy to get wrong, which in turn will make you look unprofessional and will hurt the click and conversion rates.
Your email newsletters need to function correctly. The images need to load, the links should open the correct pages or documents and the template you chose is well designed and works in both desktop and mobile email clients.
One common problem I noticed are personalised newsletters I sometimes receive but then when I click the CTA, instead of opening that offer, I’m redirected to the homepage. This will defeat the purpose of using personalised email offers, hurt conversions and annoy your customers.
3. Valuable
Inboxes are full of newsletters fighting for attention, so make sure you stand out by providing great value to your subscribers. A couple of tactics that help are personalisation and segmentation. They reduce the chances of the email content being irrelevant for the particular recipient.
When using customer segmentation, make sure the data your segments are based on is up to date and correct.
4. Exceptional
Also known as the wow! effect. Be creative with your content and design, try to surprise (positively!) every person that opens your emails. The Holy Grail of email marketing is having a subscriber list that cannot wait to receive and open your next message!
A simple tactic could be to hide some of the content in the email - for instance by blurring the images and providing a link to “Discover more” that would open the relevant page on your website.