Email marketing is one of the really successful techniques currently used in the marketing world. It has become one of the most popular techniques in recent years and is an indispensable part of online marketing.

Sending mails keeps your site active among your audience and increases visits and clicks on your site, which positively impacts your site’s business. However, while good emails increase traffic, bad ones can have the opposite effect, so be careful while creating your email content. It should attract readers and bring them to your site. You should ensure your audience likes your emails and finds them convincing. Below we discuss positive and negative aspects of emailing, which will help you understand the importance of good email content.

Aspects of good email content:

• A good email helps build up a relationship with your readers.
• A good email will make you active in your readers’ minds.
• A good email will increase your site’s visits and clicks.
• You readers will forward your mail and refer your site to their friends.
• A good email will attract your readers and convince them of your ideas.
• A good email will build trust between you and your readers.

Aspects of bad email content:

• A bad email may not enable you to connect with your readers and may harm your relationship with them.
• A bad email may not say what it is supposed to and thus create confusion.
• A bad email may bore your readers and make them ignore future emails.
• A bad email over-pitching the sales aspect may make readers feel they are being forced into buying something.
• A bad email may irritate your readers and lead them to unsubscribe to your emails.

After looking through the aspects of good and bad email content, it’s clear to see the importance of good email content, so planning such content is essential. In deciding the best content for your emails, consider the following discussion, which will help you plan accordingly.

Whenever people share their email ids with you, they expect quality information from you through mails rather than repetitive ‘buy it’ kind of messages. They will never value emails with irrelevant content that do not offer them value and only expect them to buy. Repetitive and multiple emails might bore your readers, so it is very important to maintain the content quality and frequency of sending mails. Here are a few factors to be considered while planning email content.

Your emails should contain informative and useful content that offers value to your readers. The content should be direct and focus on the readers’ interests. It should announce your deals and their benefits without overemphasizing the sales pitch. A repetitive pitch on buying can irritate your readers, so avoid it. Your email should be simple and straightforward. A complicated email will confuse your readers and serve no purpose. Maintaining simple language will be helpful, and announcing offers and giving away gifts at intervals will attract more readers. Your emails should be strong and convincing and the offers should be valuable for the readers. Below we discuss some tips to make your content valuable.

Make valuable offers

Ensure your email contains a variety of valuable offers that attract readers. Different types of offers can be made in emails including conditional emails that offer incentives to buy immediately, such as discounts, luxuries, or free gifts. Such offers make your audience decide immediately rather than postponing their decision. However, you should make sure the offer relates to an immediate decision. Only then will the conditional offer work. Free gift offers via email work for many readers. In this case again you need to ensure the free gifts are valuable to the audience and are the best available in the market at the time. The Internet rules in today’s world. Innumerable sites use the same marketing techniques in the same field as yours. Consequently, your audience will compare the gifts you and your competitors offer and go for the one that offers more value. Therefore, if your audience finds your competitors’ offer more attractive, it might ignore your offer and all your emails will be in vain. Therefore, it is important to announce the correct type of offers for your audience.

Research your competitors

Research your competitors and the offers and discounts they offer. This information can be easily accessed via the Internet. List the sites your audience is [competitors are?] likely to search for and check through their offers. You can also sign into those sites and register for emails. This will keep you updated on their offers and latest news. After researching your competitors’ offers, decide upon yours. Try to offer something better than your competitors; maybe a bigger discount or a better gift, even though this might not be possible all the time. In other situations try to qualify why your offer is a better choice, even if the discount is not significant. Provide good reasons to convince your readers to chose your offer.

Put links directed to you

Another important factor is maintaining links in emails. While mentioning links in your emails, make sure you give only your own links so your audience will follow you further and get to know you better. If you need to link some other site, then make sure you are present in their advertising space or banner ads. This will remind your audience about your message with every click and will make you present throughout their follow ups. This will also avoid the chance of your competitors reaping benefits from your email subscribers. Therefore, make sure any link mentioned in your email is directed to you and speaks about your message or idea.

Understand your audience

It is very important to understand your audience in order to send them valuable emails. Offers or information that is useful to some may not be useful to others. Everyone will have different choices and therefore you need to address everyone differently. Addressing each individual independently is impossible; therefore, you can divide your audience into groups according to age, interest, and so on. An offer that attracts a young boy may not attract a middle-aged man. By splitting your readers into age groups you can send them separate offers according to their requirements and interests. Interests vary from person to person. Analyze your readers and divide them according to their interests; when you email them keep in mind their respective interests. For example, suppose you own a sports Web site. You can offer cricket match passes to cricket lovers or badminton passes to badminton lovers. The bottom line is you need to understand your audience’s requirements and interests and base your offers on them. You can also group your audience in terms of their attitude towards money and time. Some people value convenience over time and money. Others value money and are more likely to settle for a lower offer to save money. Others value the offer and quality over price. Others again value time more than money and offers and settle on something that can be processed in a short time. You can divide your audience based on these differences and address each group, keeping in mind their respective preferences.

Make valuable content

A valuable offer doesn’t always mean a discounted price on a purchase. People always tend to postpone their decision to pay, so try making an offer that deviates slightly from the purchase and payment issue. Create interactive and valuable content for your email. Whenever you are promoting an idea or a message through your mails, express it through some interaction such as interesting descriptions or images. Such descriptions and images will support your promotional ideas and connect better with your audience. The following points will help you enhance your interaction with your audience through emails.

• Put images or videos that speak about your products or promote your ideas. People have a tendency to respond to images and videos faster than words. Therefore, using interesting images and videos to support your ideas will help.
• Get feedback from your customers. Ask them for reviews and suggestions. This interaction will help you better understand your audience and their interests. You can improve your products with their suggestions.
• Ask your audience for tag lines or descriptions for your products and involve them more in your business.
• Analyze your audience through their questions and reviews and improve your content according to their tastes.

Give away coupons or gifts

One of the best ways to attract an audience through emails is by giving away coupons or gifts. A coupon that can be printed out and used or a coupon code that can be used in any online purchase can be mentioned in your emails. You can also offer free gifts to former customers and declare lucky winners. This will satisfy your audience and they will refer you to their contacts. You can also offer your coupons to unlimited persons with a copy or printed form. Thus, customers who avail themselves of the benefit of your coupons can forward them to friends who will reap the benefit too. This will increase referrals and help your audience grow bigger. However, such coupons and free gifts should also serve you. An unlimited offer could exploit you, so it is advisable to put an expiry limit on such coupons and gifts. This will restrict your audience from exploiting your coupon’s basic idea.

Declare privileges or incentives

Through your emails declare incentives like special discounts, points, or any other such things. For example: offer a cold coin to the first 10 customers who buy from you. Or give away a free membership to a gym along with the purchase of a cycle. You can also offer special privileges for your older members, such as a 5% discount on purchases. Such privileges will help you in two ways: first they will let your older members realize you value their presence, which will make them more loyal to you. At the same time, your new members will realize the benefits of staying with you for longer. Thus, it will help you satisfy older members and convince new members at the same time.

Giving away incentives and free gifts will motivate your audience to stick with you and realize your value. This will not just motivate them to purchase and continue with you but will also encourage them to share your site with their friends and relatives, respond to quizzes and surveys hosted by you, and also develop their trust in you, which will make them share more information about themselves.

Aim for greater benefits with few losses

You need to aim for greater benefits with few losses. This is important when your business is new and your email audience doesn’t know anything about your products. In such a case you need to give away products at a much lower price than any of your competitors. This will invite the audience to try out your products; once they know you, they can refer you to their friends and colleagues. Taking such a step in the initial stages of your business will help you attract an audience, which will lead to further traffic and future benefits.

Highlight your offers and privileges

It is important to highlight your offers and privileges in your emails, otherwise they may fail to serve their purpose. Your offers should be visible and striking enough to attract your audience. Ensure they don’t ignore your emails as useless promotional offers. To highlight your offers you can put the area of the offer in bold, bordered, or colored fonts. You can also add images to attract your audience.

Call for action

This is one of the most used techniques in email marketing. Call for action is inviting the audience for an immediate action. Putting a call for action within your email makes a striking impact on your audience. It provokes your visitors to make an immediate decision. This is necessary because sometimes, even though you have quality content, people seem to delete or ignore your emails. Therefore, your mails need to be provoking and active; calling for action does this. A call for action is something that prompts your audience to take one or more decisions immediately in favor of your objectives. “Click here” is a very common phrase used in emails but it is not a very strong call for action. An effective call for action is one that allows your audience to visualize the advantages in your email content and convince them to make a decision. Many words are used to describe a call for action; some are mentioned below.

• Visit
• Call
• Download
• Read
• Print
• Share
• Follow

You can make a call for action more provoking and striking in several ways You can put additional words along with the action word to make your call for action more effective. There are four basic ways of doing so. Firstly, you can add the subject of action with the main action word. For example, Download (action word) this file (subject of action). Secondly, you can mention the place of action. For example, Download this file online (place of action). Thirdly, you can mention a time limit to signify its urgency. For example, Download this file online before the 30th of this month (signifying urgency). Finally, you can add adjectives to make the call for action more provoking. For example, Download this important (adjective) file online before the 30th of this month. You need to make your call for action a click in order to make it convenient and more effective for your audience.

Examples of using a call for action

Lengthy emails can bore users, so keep them short. However, to get your full message across can make the email long. In such cases, provide an attractive outline or summary and put in a call for action, such as “read more” or “see below.” This will maintain a balance between you and your audience’s requirements. Maintaining a list with links to its description within your email will keep your email short yet link to other necessary details. Mention action words in the subject line of the email to make it more striking.

Your emails should be aimed at delivering maximum impact to your audience. Therefore, prompting your audience to share your email content with their friends, dear ones, and colleagues is a good way of trying to reach out to people beyond your email lists. Your audience can share your email content by forwarding it to their contacts. Otherwise, you can provide a call to action to share within the email. When you put a term such as “share” to invite the audience to share your email content, ensure that your call for action is striking enough to attract readers. Add words in such a way that they grab the attention of your audience. As mentioned earlier, different people have different perspectives. All of your audience might not be interested in your “buy now” call for action. In such cases, offer them multiple calls such as: buy now, read more, or share as three options for the same product. This gives the audience a number of choices to act upon.

The best way to make your audience read your email is to make it interesting. In addition to the above- mentioned techniques, other elements can add value to your emails. These include: Providing tips for the audience through your emails; adding a field within your email content to interact with your audience through questions; and so on. It is very important to create an impact on your audience through your content, so try to interact more with your target audience by using offers, asking for reviews, or making calls for action. Read your emails as an audience would and think from their point of view. Also try to experiment with your skills in improving interaction with your audience. These are the tips to plan the best content for your email. Finally, make sure your email content is crisp, clear, and direct. This is because only a crisp, clear, and direct email will invite a crisp, clear, and direct response from your audience.

Image Credits

• Time gifts
• Teacher and children
• Savings coupons and scissors
• E-mail client close-up