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Content for Email Marketing - Women on phones

by Oliver Brainerd

 

Do you remember email chains? Those emails you’d get sometimes with six gazillion “fwd:”s in the subject line, and then the email had like, a picture of a kitten or a riddle or an inspiring story or a joke. Or the one I remember most claimed to be from some kid doing a social experiment for school. One of the questions that still keeps me up at night is what kind of scam was that? I bet those were put together by someone way ahead of the curve trying to pad their mailing list without putting in any real work.

 

Does that sound cynical? Perhaps that’s cynical of me. Maybe there really were kids around the country doing social experiments to see how far their emails would go.

 

Maybe I’ve spent too much time in marketing. It seems impossible that those email chains didn’t have an angle.

 

Times have changed and yet in certain ways, they’ve stayed the same. All that content from email chains has moved onto social feeds, and email inboxes have become the moral equivalent of recycling bins full of anonymous marketing content.

 

At some point, everyone engaged in marketing will have to face the question: is email marketing obsolete?

 

There’s an easy answer: Email marketing is a crazy useful tool if you use it right.

 

And there’s a hard answer: Email marketing is alive and well but it depends on how you do it. Implementing effective content for email marketing requires planning.

 

Content for Email Marketing

The Difference between Emails that People Care about and Spam

 

We are so used to giving away our email addresses whenever we sign up for anything. Some of us even have dummy email accounts because we don’t want to deal with all the junk flowing into our main email addresses. If you’re one of these people you might be wondering if you should involve email marketing in your strategy at all.

 

There’s a simple (if not easy) way to turn email marketing into something not only powerful, but also a fun and attractive part of your marketing. That simple thing is getting your brand right. If your brand is right, then people will look forward to receiving your emails.

 

Branding is a subject for another article. In this blog, we’re working under the assumption that you’ve got your brand figured out. With that foundation, we can talk about some of the techniques you can implement.

 

Email Marketing Content Ideas:

 

 

How to Write Email Content

 

woman typing on computer - content for email marketing

 

You’ll find a lot of advice out there about writing the perfect email for marketing.

 

Some of these include:

 

So which is it? There are as many schools of thought as there are references to flowers in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Is that an obsolete reference? How about Dr. Dre references in Eminem songs. That’s more current.

 

There are a lot of hot takes on writing the perfect email content. The annoying thing is that most of them are right, because writing emails is as technical as any other kind of writing, and writing is a many-layered process.

 

A good rule of thumb for writing emails has three aspects:

 

Imagery and GIFs

 

As with any other marketing, pictures talk. Should you include imagery in your emails? It depends. They can be another effective way to communicate with your customers so they shouldn’t be overlooked, however not every type of email needs them.

 

Selecting imagery requires the same process as any other decision in your marketing strategy: does it fit my brand?

 

If you want to use GIFs in your business emails, then you need to decide whether they complement your brand. If you use GIFs elsewhere in your marketing with success, then they might suit your email marketing as well. It just depends on your brand.

 

Email Sequences – Your Robot Employees

 

email icon on phone - email sequences

 

Automation is your friend. Emails can feel like single-direction communication: send an email, and the receiver has information. You used to be left wondering whether anything happened after you hit send. Not anymore. Now, an email can provide you a host of useful information, if you collect and apply it right. There’s so much data you can now see in CRM tools.

 

Stuff like…

 

You get the idea.

 

Armed with this kind of data, you have the tools to design automation to send emails to do more than just passively hope people read your emails. Put another way, you can train your robot employees to keep in touch with your email list. More than that, you can tell your robots to be strategic in the way they do it.

 

When you have data about the recipients of your emails, you can set up automations to achieve particular goals. This affects your content for email marketing. You can create sequences to achieve goals like…

 

 

These are just some of the many email sequences you can use to guide customers in specific ways.

 

It all sounds fairly complicated, only because it sort of is. Automation brings with it a host of headache-y questions, like…

 

 

Fortunately–slight plug here–there are professional digital marketing people who are not only fairly experienced at designing and implementing this email marketing automation, some of us (for some reason) kind of enjoy it. We’re nerds in that way. Implementing effective content for email marketing is our specialty.

 

ARC Creative Co. is an email marketing agency that sent over 25 million emails for one company alone last year. Book a call with an ARC representative to see how we can help you grow your business and increase ROI through email marketing. Book a call here.

 

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