You’ve read the articles, seen the studies and are very much aware of the power of email marketing – so why aren’t your company’s promotional emails having more of an effect?
If you’re at a loss as to why this is the case, consider asking yourself this question: Is your email marketing content too complicated?
When it comes to email marketing, “complicated” can have more than one definition, so let’s take a look at a few:
1. Too much text
Email marketing is the easy, breezy, instant equivalent of direct mail. In a sense, its very nature is at odds with long, wordy paragraphs, but some businesses apparently never got that memo. When customers open a message from your company, they’re not expecting a term paper, so don’t give them one.
Brevity is your friend here, so limit yourself to one or two bold headlines and just a few sentences of supporting text.
2. An abundance of promotions
Everyone likes a good deal, right? Perhaps, but when you send an email that details five or six of them back to back, that’s likely to be a major turnoff for recipients. Don’t make people wade through a ton of information they don’t care about before they finally get to a promotion that interests them.
Many consumers only glance at emails before deleting them, meaning part of your message may never reach them. Those who do read the entire thing might be frustrated by the time they reach a deal they care about – not an emotion you want them to associate with your business!
3. Not enough mixed media
If your promotional emails are composed of concise, to-the-point sentences, you might be patting yourself on the back for successfully avoiding the pitfall of including too much text. However, is text the only component of your messages? Failing to break up even small amounts of text with graphics, photos or other visual media can make emails seem boring and dissuade recipients from reading them.
So, what’s the solution? To put it bluntly, keep your customers by keeping things simple. In other words, remember not to let the amount of text in your promotions get out of control and try to break up blocks of words with different forms of media, such as images. If you want to showcase a sale or special offer, zero in on one particular promotion and make it the sole focus of the message, rather than flooding customers with information about multiple deals – especially when the recipients are likely to regard most of them as irrelevant.
