This guest post is by Elizabeth Yin, CEO and co-founder of LaunchBit and NewsletterDirectory.co, an ad network for high quality email newsletters.
Email marketing is one of those activities you’re told to do, but you never really know how to do it effectively to increase engagement and/or sales for your company. Here are 4 tips to increase engagement in your email newsletter:
1) Assess exactly what you need to improve
There are so many different email stats you could be improving — your open rate, your click-through-rate, etc… Trying to improve all of them is too difficult and time consuming. Get a free assessment of your 2012 email communications with the Email Newsletter Report Card to see specifically where and how to improve. Check out what a full sample report card looks like here.
2) Optimize your layout for engagement
Email layout is one of the most ignored aspects of email marketing. Marketers spend far too much time thinking about creative and split testing content. Yet, just like on the web, you need a layout that makes it easy for your subscribers to click on your call to action.
In general, you should use:
- CSS buttons so that people who do not display images can see them
- 1 column to reduce clutter and confusion
- Use tables and inline styles (email styling is old-school)
Consider more best practices for mobile email if you have 30%+ mobile subscribers.
3) Reduce the number of links
My friend sends an email newsletter to 250k+ subscribers. I looked at her latest newsletter, and she had 40 links in her latest send!
“Why so many?” I asked.
“Because I want people to click and come back to my site!” she said.
It turns out that having more links doesn’t actually help with your click-through-rate. Having more links merely distributes the clicks. This brings me to my 4th tip.
4) Move your call-to-action up
When we looked at publishers who have < 5 links, it turns out the most clicked links are links #1 and #2. You can get a greater concentration of clicks on your key call to action by moving it to the second or first link.
For example, in this newsletter, you should expect the bulk of the clicks to be on these two links.
Love the infographics in this blog post! Thanks Elizabeth and Rishi. This is just the kind of post that I find most helpful. I’m starting to build a subscriber list for http://UniversityWebinars.org and I will use these tips.
Great, Darin. Feel free to email me hello [at] launchbit [dot] com if you have any questions about email marketing.