With Black Friday around the corner, many businesses will be looking for ways to stand out against their competitors. Email marketing is a highly effective channel marketing tool. It allows you to speak directly to prospects, existing customers, and past customers, building stronger relationships at a time that is convenient for them. With the right messaging, email marketing can make a significant impact on customer engagement. Therefore it is crucial that your email marketing for Black Friday stands out from your competitors. This blog will provide you with five tips to improve your email marketing campaigns and help you stand out against competitors to increase customer engagement.

Plan Your Campaigns in Advance

Planning your email marketing campaigns sounds so simple, but it is something that many businesses fail to do. Without proper planning, your content can seem disjointed, and your messaging and branding will seem inconsistent. Always make sure you are analysing previous campaigns and social media posts. This allows you to see what messaging you have sent out previously and will prevent you from sending out any messaging that is inconsistent or entirely contradictory to previous messaging. In fact a study by Blue Research found that 94% of consumers have discontinued communication with a business because of inconsistent or irrelevant messaging; therefore, it is crucial that you plan your content in advance to avoid issues like this. 

Create Human Campaigns

Email marketing gives you the power to directly reach out and speak to your prospects, existing customers, and past customers. The campaigns you create need to be engaging. If not, the reader will most likely move on and discard your email. Your content should appeal to your reader, making them eager to learn more about your business or product. One of the best ways to appeal to your audience is by directing the email to them. This can be done by including their name in the subject line or body of the email, which most email service providers can do. This adds a personal touch to your email and makes your readers feel that you are speaking to them directly and not just sending an email to them, which thousands of people have also received.

Appearance is Just as Important as Written Content

While creating consistent messaging and interesting content is essential, many businesses forget the importance of appearance and formatting. Whenever we look at content, from social media to magazines, we always judge what we see first. Creating email campaigns that look interesting is just as important as what is written in the emails. A reader can be turned off instantly just by looking at an email without even having read it, all because of how it looks. Many businesses still don’t fully understand the importance in the appearance of how an email marketing campaign looks despite it being a simple fix. The appearance of an email campaign can be improved by simply adding colour via graphics or images, and by ensuring that font sizes and styles are consistent throughout the email. These simple fixes will help increase your open rate and improve customer engagement.

Create Compelling Subject Lines

The subject line of your email is one of the best ways to improve your email open rate. When deciding your email subject line, you want to create something that will draw your reader in and make them intrigued to click on your email. The best way to achieve this is by adding a question in your subject line. Humans are curious by nature, so if the reader sees a question in the subject line, they are much more likely to click on your email to find out the answer. On the other hand, a poor subject line can vastly decrease your email open rate as readers will not be interested in your email and may not think it is relevant to them.

In some cases, your email subject line may even cause your email to end up in people’s ‘spam’ folders. Emails usually end up in spam folders when the subject line is perceived to be clickbait; this means it could include words such as ‘free’ or ‘sign up now’, or an overuse of emojis. Having a good subject line is important, if people are not engaging with your emails, they are not engaging with your business. 

Create Interesting Calls to Action

The call to action is one of the most important parts of any email marketing campaign. It instructs the reader on what to do and encourages them to follow up on your email. The most important thing to remember with any call to action is to keep it concise and clear. Examples of great calls to action include ‘Learn more,’ ‘Register here’, and ‘Get discount code.’ With a good call to action, you will see an increase in click-through rates and a larger number of your audience engaging with your email marketing campaigns. If you have a poor call to action or don’t have one at all, your audience is less likely to engage with your content and, in turn, with your business.

If you’re thinking about creating an email marketing campaign or would like advice on how to improve your current marketing strategy, get in touch with Beacon at hello@beaconagency.co.uk