Email marketing is undeniably a tool with a high ROI for most businesses. It is relatively low cost and easy to use. One thing to keep in mind is that each email must be carefully designed to strike the proper balance between the benefit to the readers and the purpose it serves for the sender for email marketing to be effective. It’s an art to strike the right balance, and it’s a skill worth honing. 

In this article, we will walk you through how to craft a winning email. There are two components to this: set your goal and optimize each part of your email to achieve that goal.

Set your goal

Having a well-defined goal sets you up for success. To get a clear picture of the goal, expand on the five Ws in your goal setting.

• Who – Before sending emails to your audience, you must first establish your understanding of them. For instance, who are they, what issues are they facing, how can your service/product help them, what kind of content will be useful to them, and so on. The more you know about your target audience, the more likely you are to get what you want from them. 

• What – Your goal needs to be specific and measurable so your email tool can track the effectiveness of your emails. 

• When – This is more than just choosing a time or day to deliver your email. It’s crucial to know where your readers are in their customer journey. This is to better curate email content that is appropriate for them. Sending emails to leads who aren’t engaged is a bad idea. Instead, you should interact with those who are interested in what you have to offer.

• Where – As the majority of the emails are opened on the go in today’s environment, your email is likely to be viewed on a smartphone or tablet. Hence, you should tailor your email template and design to the various devices. 

• Why – You must be clear about the purpose of the email that you are sending. For example, are you providing value to your readers or developing relationships with them.

You will have a better chance of achieving your goals once you are clear on what you want to achieve. Next, we will go on to the second part:

Optimizing each part of your email to achieve your goal

You must optimize every part of your email to achieve conversions. As your audience must first open your emails before any conversion may take place, these three factors are important when it comes to crafting your email: subject line, sender address and preview text. 

• Subject line – Avoid having a long subject line, 41 to 50 characters is the ideal length for mobile devices. Words like “free”, “discount”, excessive exclamation marks or capital letters among others should be avoided because they can trigger spam filters. The ideal subject line should be short, creative and human. 

• Sender’s address – Use a person’s name in the “from” section of your email to make things more familiar and personable. Avoid sending emails from a no-reply address as they are less effective. Instead, have these emails sent straight from the sender with his/her name in the sender’s address. 

• Preview text – Be sure to display the value of your content in the preview plane to entice your audience to open the email. 

Once you have enticed your audience to open your emails, it’s time to deliver value.

• Email copy – Your email copy should be simple, sincere, and useful, and it should reflect why you do what you do. Because most readers don’t have time to read long emails, the conversation should be engaging and the content should be easily digestible. Pro tips: use short paragraphs, headers and bullet points as much as possible!

• Call to action – Stick to only one CTA to avoid confusing your readers. This is essential in driving them to your desired goal.

• Email template – The template should be straightforward, clean and uncluttered, and should be consistent with your branding.

• Footer – Your footer should include your company’s physical address as well as a link to adjust their email preferences or to simply unsubscribe.

• Design and images – As the quote says, “A picture is worth a thousand words”, you may include some high-quality images in your emails. Some readers, however, may have difficulty viewing the images due to a bad connection or a disabled image display. Therefore, the email’s design is crucial, and it should not be impaired even if the image fails to load. It’s best to have a simple layout, fewer columns, and designs that are optimized for mobile devices. 

Last but not least, we suggest sending the email to yourself after crafting the email and viewing them on different devices. This is to ensure that everything is being displayed correctly across all devices.

We wish you the best of luck in your efforts to generate positive conversations with your leads!