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Written by Professional Academy Guest Blogger Laura Slingo
We all know that email is one of the most effective ways to market your business and your products.
But that’s exactly the problem — everyone knows this, and now there’s nothing to make you stand out in a crowded inbox. The result? Consumers switch off, skim over your email (if they even click into it at all) and don’t engage with your content.
As quickly as marketing tactics evolve, consumers are becoming desensitised and bored. So how do you keep them engaged?
Writing great emails and coming up with strong concepts is a good place to start. In this post, we’ll go through three email marketing ideas that will actually keep your recipient engaged. Read on for some top email writing inspiration.
If you want to keep your subscribers engaged, tell them a story.
Humans have been telling stories since the beginning of our existence, huddled around warm fires in our caves. Through the ages, we’ve gathered to share recollections and fictional days — to teach lessons, swap useful information, or simply to make a rainy day a bit more interesting.
In recent times, storytelling has been adopted by the marketing industry; it’s a powerful tool for marketing brands, selling products, and engaging with consumers.
Through storytelling in your email marketing, you can create an engaging, emotional narrative that captures your subscriber’s attention, and creates an authentic, shared experience between you.
The stories you tell are up to you. You could write about your business’s origin story, your hardworking team, or highlight customers that you’ve already helped.
Once you’ve decided on your story, you need to go about crafting your email copy. Writing an engaging email is not dissimilar to writing a novel (albeit much shorter). This guide from Jericho Writers on how to write a book has some great tips that can be applied to your email marketing, such as adding an unforgettable character or two. In your case, this could be shining a spotlight on some of your fabulous, hardworking team and centering a story around them.
You could also write about your customer’s stories, or highlight people that your product has helped. All of these options work to paint a clearer picture of your brand and its values, and help to build trust.
Pair strong characters with a compelling plot — such as a heart-warming origin story, a funny behind-the-scenes or uplifting ‘how our product is changing the world’ story — and you’ve got an email that will keep your recipients captivated.
Another way to really engage your readers is to build anticipation in your emails — by creating a multiple-email campaign.
This is known as an email sequence; a powerful email marketing tactic where a series of emails are sent at predetermined intervals or through trigger-based automation. Emails like this are perfect for building anticipation and generating a buzz around your brand or your latest product.
The idea is that by drip-feeding information to your subscribers, you can keep them hyper-engaged with a campaign, ultimately ending in a product launch or sale that your subscriber will participate in.
Like the storytelling concept that we spoke about above, a sequential email campaign will be split up into stages (sort of like chapters). Roughly speaking, an email sequence will be laid out like this:
For more detail and email types, check out this email sequence blog post from Sumo.
Email sequences are an effective way of capturing your recipient’s attention and keeping them engaged. It’s all about reeling them in with a strong hook and building suspense as your campaign develops.
One of the best ways to keep your recipient engaged in your email marketing is by making your emails all about them.
At the end of the day, marketing is like having a conversation with your customers. You don’t want it to be one-sided — just you talking at consumers and telling them how amazing you and your product are. You want — and need — to have conversations where you listen to what your customers have to say.
Getting personal, and basing content on the recipient’s wants and needs will ensure that your email keeps them engaged.
This is known as personalisation, and can involve anything from addressing the individual recipient by name in your email, to recommending product purchases for them, to offering relevant content, to referencing the day that they signed up to your service.
By tailoring your emails specifically to a reader’s interests, you can build a meaningful relationship with them, show that you value them, and keep them interested. And by using an email automation tool, it’s not particularly time-consuming to do, either.
By using the three email marketing ideas above, you can create emails and campaigns that will actually keep your recipient engaged. Tell exciting stories, build anticipation and make your content personal; all of these tactics will entice and compel your subscribers, while promoting your brand and increasing sales.
If you are interested in Sales, Marketing, Management or Digital Marketing then you are in the right hands, Professional Academy will help you progress further into your career! We offer both electronic and printed copies of learning material and the chance to undertake a professional qualification within a time-frame that suits you. If you would like to find out more you can speak to a qualifications advisor today or download a prospectus.