5 tips for optimising your email creatives

Email marketing can be a highly effective tool for reaching out and engaging with new customers. It can also be a fantastically successful way of putting them off your brand, and generating a great big file of unsubscribes. I know I’m not the only person full of boyish enthusiasm, who has deployed an email broadcast in the certain knowledge that I was going to make loads of sales! Only to find myself complaining to my colleagues in the pub a few days later, that the email was rubbish and it “just doesn’t work for this audience.”

So just like the old me, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s some mystical dark art to getting email marketing to work. And I’m sure there are plenty of email practitioners out there that would readily agree with you.

But it’s not true. A little bit of getting things wrong and quite a lot of other people showing me how to do things right has taught me a few simple tips to ensure email campaigns work. So here’s my top five:

Relevant content is King! Personalise your emails with a killer offer and a clear call-to-action. Few things in life upset me more than receiving emails about over- 50’s insurance. I’m sure it’s fascinating but it’s just not relevant to me. And if an offer is relevant to me, I’m really not going to spend 10 minutes hunting around for a button to click.

Design with the preview pane in mind to increase open rates - avoid blocking it completely with images and add a sense of urgency to your message. A little information goes a long way here. If someone starts reading something they are more likely to want to finish it, so make sure you can see some text in the preview pane. If what the recipient can see in the preview makes them want to open the email then it’s done its job.

Create a strong visual impact with a simple layout and emotive imagery - avoid overdesigning the creative. When there are a thousand things going on in the email, the easiest button to click is the delete button.

Workaround SPAM filter triggers - watch out for spam words and use the 60:40 text to image ratio rule. There’s really no point creating a beautiful emotive email with a killer offer and a clear call-to-action, if it never gets delivered or it rots unseen in the recipient’s junk folder. If it’s all pretty images and no text this is what will happen.

Be open and transparent throughout...'From' line, subject line and content - make your creative compliant and only email explicitly opted-in data! Why would you want to email people who don’t want to hear from you anyway? You’re better off paying for quality opted-in data rather than spamming everyone and risking getting fined. Or fired.

If you think this stuff’s good and you want lots more then you should check out my free downloadable guide here.