Top 10 Tips To Guide You To Email Success

Every year, billions of email marketing campaigns are circulated to customers across every sector. As they continue to flood your prospects’ inboxes, it becomes all the more vital that yours stand out and reach the right recipients. To help you maximize your impact, we’ve put together this quick guide to email success.

Email marketing is a vital tool for businesses

Email marketing is a direct way to distribute personalized messages straight to the inbox of your existing and prospective customers. These emails might include informative, entertaining, or promotional content aimed at encouraging your audience to take action.

Email is an incredibly versatile tool – it helps you to build relationships with your customer base and directly market to different audience segments at a relatively low cost. For more information, read our dedicated guide to all things email marketing and get answers to your burning questions.

10 tips for effective email marketing

1. Provide valuable content

To grab and keep your customers’ attention, your emails need to provide value. Whether it’s informative articles, exclusive promotions, or helpful insights about your product or service, you should aim to deliver content that establishes trust and reinforces your brand’s authority engagingly.

By consistently offering value in your emails, you’ll keep subscribers interested and eager to open future communications, ultimately driving stronger relationships and better results for your cross-channel marketing efforts.

2. Place a call to action early in the email

Most people skim-read emails to see if they offer anything of value. If your content grabs their interest, they’ll be more likely to click on a link or take action. That’s why you need to place your call to action (CTA) near the top of your email.

The alternative—leaving your CTA until later—risks losing the reader’s attention. In the fast-paced digital world, people’s attention spans are short. So, place your CTA within the first sentence or right after the opening paragraph to ensure it gets noticed.

3. Left-align your text

When formatting your emails, you’ll quickly learn that left-aligned text is much easier to read. This is because when you center-align your text, the starting place of each line changes. This forces your readers to work harder to find where each line begins and continue reading. Without a straight left edge, there is no consistent place where users can move their eyes when they complete each line.

So, in the interest of keeping readers switched on to your text, you should make it as readable as possible. This includes its format on screens. With left alignment, users can read each line by simply moving their eyes to the left edge each time, making your paragraphs faster and easier to read.

4. Include links throughout your email

While placing a link at the start of your email is a good strategy, you should also incorporate links throughout the email to encourage more click-throughs. Whether it’s in the body content, an image, or a ‘Find Out More’ button—use clear and enticing links that guide recipients toward engagement.

5. Add alternate text to your images

Alternate or ‘alt’ text can ensure maximum accessibility and improve the user experience of your emails. This is a short description of an image’s content that can be interpreted by a screen reader or displayed in the email itself when an email client doesn’t automatically download images.

By adding alt text to all of your imagery, you’re able to get your message across to the email recipient even if they can’t see the image, which is growing increasingly common as a security measure against malicious email content. In instances when your emails rely heavily on images, alt tags are a useful tool.

6. Add preview text (a Super Subject Line)

Preview text, or the preheader, is the snippet of text that appears after the email subject line in most email programs. Think of it as your second chance to grab attention if the subject line didn’t do the trick. This short bit of copy can give readers another compelling reason to open the email or follow one of its CTAs.

7. Be descriptive and concise

Once you’ve written the content to be included in your marketing emails, it’s vital that you don’t use the standard ‘read more’ or ‘buy now’ CTAs. Instead, they need to be transactional. The recipient must know what they’re reading more of and what will happen to them once they’ve made that click.

And when it comes to the language you use, the more concise the better. If users have to scroll to read the entire email, then make it a landing page or a web page instead. Readability is crucial, so while you need to clearly inform readers of your message, you shouldn’t ever include more content than necessary just for the sake of it.

8. If you’re sending out a prospect email, send it from the CEO

Boost the success of your prospect emails by sending them from the CEO. Even if the CEO didn’t write the email, their name adds credibility and makes it more likely that the recipient will engage or respond.

Many companies fall into the trap of sending sales emails from the Managing Director — as usually, they’re the person who has approved the email. But as fewer people will know who the MD is for the company, it’s a better strategy to send from CEO and include the company name.

9. Provide standard blue hyperlinks

Any links you insert in the text of your email should follow the classic hyperlink format — blue, underlined, clickable. Unless you’re using a compelling CTA button. This makes it easy for recipients to spot links while they’re skimming through your email.

If you’re using branded links, be careful. Recipients may be wary of clicking on unfamiliar branded links if they don’t clearly indicate the destination, leading to lower click-through rates. If you’re reaching out to a customer who could be unfamiliar with your brand, stick to conventional hyperlink tactics.

10. Distribute your email with a mailing list

One of the most effective ways to circulate your message is to use a mailing list. This is a collection of email addresses used to distribute marketing emails to subscribers who have opted in to receiving communications.

Using a mailing list offers a host of benefits, delivering higher traffic and rates of conversion. This is achieved through:

• Targeted communication — A well-curated mailing list includes the email addresses of individuals who have expressed interest in your products, field, or content, ensuring messages are delivered to the readers who will be most receptive to them.
• Relationship building — A loyal customer who can provide you with a lifetime of sales is a valuable asset. By regularly distributing relevant, engaging content to subscribers, you help build trust and credibility, keeping your brand perception intact and ensuring yours is the first business they think of when they have a specific need.
• Measurable results — A good mailing list platform will provide analytics and monitoring tools to ensure your emails are being delivered, opened, and actioned. This will help you measure the effectiveness of your email campaign and make informed decisions.

But the question is, how do you set up a mailing list? And how do you do it easily?

How to create an email list for marketing

To build an email list, you’ll first have to select an email marketing platform to distribute your campaign emails with. There are a number of useful email marketing platforms that support mailing list creation. These include:

• Mailchimp
• Constant Contact
• Brevo
• ActiveCampaign

However, you can also use your CRM platform to easily set up a mailing list, or integrate your email platform with CRM.

Partner with Workbooks to create customer email lists

Workbooks allows you to build a mailing list right out of your integrated CRM platform. With us, you’re able to:

• Build tailored mailing lists each with unique configurations
• Create dynamic lists to be automatically refreshed based on reports
• Copy lists selecting members in bulk or based on specific filters
• Manually add members to mailing lists from reports, campaigns or other lists

Email marketing is a powerful tool that can be streamlined and enriched with intelligently configured email lists, right out of your CRM platform. Learn more about what Workbooks can do for your marketing campaigns, or explore our free interactive demo today!