Email marketing is still by far the highest return on investment of any digital marketing channel, but it's a wildly saturated area. So how do you craft emails that make people take notice in a sea of inbound messages?
The content you display in your emails can help to improve their engagement. Whether you aim to drive traffic to your website, engage your audience with an awareness piece, or boost ROI, the content used will help you deliver.
The better the quality of the content you use in your emails will help propel your story and demonstrate authority within the messaging. Content marketing allows you to express your business core values and solidify your organisation as an authoritative figure in your sector.
No one wants another sales message in their inbox. They want to be intrigued, enticed, and shown why they should care about your product or service.
Defining content
Content in this context refers to content marketing, and by this, I mean videos, text, imagery, social posts, etc.
Hubspot defines content marketing as
Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content via channels such as social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, apps, press releases, print publications, and more. The goal is to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty.
Using this rich media within your emails will make you stand out from the crowd in a world where over 300 billion emails are sent every day. But how do you make the most of your email content?
5 tips leveraging content in email marketing
Find out what your audience wants to see in your emails
How will you know what your audience wants from you if you never ask them? Working on assumptions may get you so far, but you won't understand how to truly engage, without gaining actual insight. Consider creating a survey to find out what content your audience would like to receive from you and at what frequency. You can then build a better relationship by sourcing content that is most relevant to them from your brand. This may even result in a drop in unsubscribes...
Encourage your content to be shared
Digital marketing should never be done in siloes, but you should try to ensure a seamless journey across all the channels you use, to allow your customer to have a cohesive experience with your business. Using content in your emails that is relevant, informative, and interesting may mean people want to share it with others, so consider including functionality that lets them post your content directly to their social media feeds. This may also mean you have the opportunity to grow your network as more people will be able to view your content outside of your existing database - a great opportunity for organic list growth!
Maintain a consistent brand voice in all your content
Maintaining consistency is vital for any business, as you need to ensure that your customer can recognise the content as coming from you. Try to decide on your tone of voice for each channel upfront and stick to this as much as possible.
Build brand loyalty and trust
Email marketing produces such good results because your subscribers have voluntarily provided you with their email addresses. They want to hear from you and they can choose to stop hearing from you whenever they want. By using content that is transparent, upfront, and simple to understand (video is a great one for this), you build affinity. And by setting expectations with email frequency and sticking to this you show respect for your customer's time and privacy!
Don't be afraid to test and learn
The great thing about email is that you can test different approaches without there being a huge knock-on effect on the overall performance of your activity. Testing various content types to see what engages your audience the most will mean you can continue to provide them with something they enjoy reading. Most email technology allows A/B testing to happen on subject lines and with content, meaning you can even run your test on a small group of people and let the majority receive the winning version! Pretty neat really.
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