21 One-Sentence Email Marketing Tips for Ecommerce

Email marketing has evolved into the most important marketing tool than ever. Marketers are seeing significantly improved ROI with less costs and that’s the reason why email marketing remains the most effective channel for not just customer acquisition but optimizing the entire customer lifecycle. As per a survey by Statista on the marketing budgets in the United States in 2015, 53 percent of respondents reported intending to increase spending on e-mail marketing.

However, marketers need to take a few steps to ensure that they are not bombarding their customers with mindless spam. And to harness the power of email marketing, it’s crucial to work on every aspect of each campaign. Everything from the subject line to the preheader to the copy of the email to the ratio of pictures to text can affect the open, click- through rates, and conversions of your emails.

But there’s a problem; most email marketers don’t know how to optimize each and every element of the email to get best results. The 20 points mentioned below offers some big picture guidance for your email campaigns.

Subject Line Strategy

“Subject line” is one of the most crucial elements of an email marketing campaign. It determines the open rate, on which the conversion rates, and the overall performance of the entire email-marketing program depends. Your emails won’t be making you any money, if you can’t get people to open them. In long-term, email open rate can even affect your email deliverability rate. So, follow these subject line rules to make sure you stand out in your customer jam-packed inboxes.

1)Always write a catchy but descriptive subject line. Pique the customer’s interest with personalized subject lines.

2) Long subject lines can reduce your open rates as most emails are opened on mobile phone these days, so keep it under 30 characters.

3)Whenever possible, use question marks in your subject line, as they tend to results in more opens.

4)Avoid words like “free,” “hurry up,” “guarantee,” and “order now” as they sometimes trigger spam alerts.

5)Just because something works (or doesn’t) for others doesn’t mean the same holds true for you, try and test your subject line and keep testing.

Preheader Space Utilization

Preheader text matters. There’s a reason why more space is dedicated to it than the subject line. If you are not effectively utilizing this space you’re wasting your valuable real estate.

1)The preheader should either compliment or supplement your subject line.

2)Use an easy to read font for your preheader text.

3)Do not waste your preheader space by repeating what you’ve already stated in your subject line.

4)Always A/B test your preheader text just like your subject lines.

Email Copy

No matter how creative your subject line is or how fancy your email looks, if your email copy is devoid of well-written content, subscribers will stop opening your messages, and your list will quickly dwindle in value. Great copy requires balance: pay equal attention to images and content.

1)Make sure to use descriptive ‘Alt-tags’ for all your images, so that people can find out what’s in your images even when the images aren’t displayed

2)Space out your text properly, and don’t include massive chunks of text in any paragraph

3)Make sure your copy has no spelling and grammar mistakes

4)Use active voice in your copy to keep your readers hooked

Perfect Your Design

According to stats, an average person receives 121 emails each day. With inbox overload, the design of the email plays a crucial role to break through the pack. Amongst so much competition, a great email design is a must to capture the attention of the reader and avoid being deleted right away.

1)Use responsive design to make sure your email look good on every device

2)Keep it clean and simple, but keep your branding consistent, so that recipients know exactly who the email is coming from the moment they open it

3)Neatly organize the layout, use consistent spacing in-between the elements

4)Use more text than images (ideally 80% text, 20% images recommended)

5)Ensure all links and buttons are easily clickable with a finger and are not placed too close to other links, to avoid click errors.

Call To Action

Your email looks great. You’ve spent a lot of time in designing it and writing your copy. Subscribers are opening it, reading it, but it isn’t converting. Why? Perhaps your subscribers are having a hard timefinding out what is that they’ve to do because there isn’t a clear call to action.  They simply don’t know what do you want them to do.

1)Make your CTA big so that people don’t miss them, and they’ll be easier to click.

2) Getting people to open your email is hard but getting them to take action is harder, use “Action Oriented Words” in your CTA to make them more compelling.

3) Don’t place your CTA too close to your content otherwise they’ll get lost in the clutter. Remember, every email you send is an opportunity to establish a good relationship with your customer. Keep them engaged and they will keep on welcoming you in their inboxes.

[This is a guest post from Reshu Rathi, Sr. Marketing Manager at Betaout. Betaout is a customer segmentation and marketing automation platform for Ecommerce]