Jodie’s Email Marketing Tips

Have a plan and be organised

What do they say, ‘fail to plan and plan to fail’, it’s so true! With all aspects of life you need a plan and you should always keep coming back to it. There are systems that just work in life and most of that comes from good planning, action, habits, and creating an outcome with results – always be results driven and have a clear goal in sight. Keep asking yourself why? What do I hope to achieve?

In regards to your email marketing, everyone’s going to create a different plan with different content depending on your industry, but there are definitely some industry rules so to speak, that just work. Make sure you keep consistency with your delivery and always have a clear message.

Keep your emails short and succinct

We humans are super time poor these days and even if we aren’t, we still like to tell everybody we are. It’s just a sign of the times, if you are in the business world then you need to be seen as ‘being busy’, ‘in a rush’, is it actually real? Some of it is, and some of it is just a mindset society and people have created in our heads, and because we are all so busy, most of us don’t get a chance to step back and see life and reality for what it actually is, but that’s another topic..

The current reality is that most people are time poor and as much as they love you they just don’t have the time to read your essay email. So break it up, ideally write blog posts on your website, then link to them from your email. The email can just contain a small snippet of text with a nice image so it’s much cleaner to look at, and means everyone who’s interested in something different can get to what they want to read faster.

Make your content interesting

Put yourself in your readers shoes, no don’t do that actually, they might not feel so comfy! But do offer your clients something they want to read, try and provide them with content that will help, and always keep trying to solve their problems.  If you don’t know what their problems are, just phone them and ask.

These days peoples attention span is less than ever and every second person is being told they have ADHD it seams, in general we like to see less text, more photos and video so we can take in more information faster (the same goes for your website). With each email campaign, try to keep your messages simple, clear and concise.

Use call to action buttons and add alt text to all your images

Put a little content in the email and then link them across to your website. Why? A couple of main reasons, firstly your website is King and you want to drive as much traffic, any and all, day and night, to your website. You are in a popularity contest in Google, so the more ‘popular’ you make your website by driving traffic there from email and social media etc. the better for you in the long run. Secondly, a long, wordy email will turn anybody off and see them close it before you manage to get them anywhere near your call to action button!

In your email campaign alt text on images is super important because when someone who doesn’t have images turned on, receives your email and they don’t see any images, they will only see the alt text. You could choose to make the alt text actionable by writing something like click here to read about…  This just helps make your viewers experience easier. Adding alt text to your images also applies to your website – don’t forget them!!

Create your email with mobile users front of mind!

The number of users checking email, websites and social media from their phones is through the roof, the statistics have risen dramatically in the past years.  You almost need to plan for and prioritise your mobile users over the desktop users now, or at least think of them equally.

Make sure your email responds for the phone, so users don’t have to scroll about. Definitely test and make sure all images are aligned and display correctly, you must test before you hit send!

Make sure you have a plain-text version of the email

Not all viewers will see your beautiful, HTML, rich-text version of the email, so make sure you optimise the plain-text version as well so they can easily read it and it doesn’t come through looking like a scrambled mess!

Some users have images blocked by default so another good trick is to add an alt tag to your first image and call the alt tag something like: PLEASE ENABLE IMAGES TO VIEW THIS EMAIL – that will then be the first thing they read. Just like websites look slightly different in different browsers and devices, so do your email campaigns.

Proof your emails and test, test, test before hitting send

Once you’ve hit send there is no turning back so make the time to test, test, test first. Do multiple tests to different email recipients if you can and make sure everything is looking tickety-boo before hitting send. We receive enough emails these days without receiving emails all out of whack or with jumbled content, and then a following email saying sorry the last email was a mistake, then an hour later another email saying here is the actual content – seriously? That is 3 emails already… nobody wants that, so put the time in first and double, triple check everything, even have another set of eyes proof your work and do it right the first time – the world will just be a happier place for it.