Spreading the word about your product or service is a tough task. Advertising is no joke, and creating meaningful advertisements that bring customers in is tough in such a competitive market particularly. Here in this article will be some inspiring and creative email marketing ideas for you to use so that your business can grow. Keep in mind that these are just ideas. Feel free to do whatever suits your business best.
Creative Email Marketing Ideas that Utilize Incentives
Any seasoned business person knows that providing incentives to customers is a classic way to obtain new customers. Using incentives ranges from a coupon to a free sample or something simple like a free quote.
Depending on your business, different incentives can be more powerful than others. For some people, an incentive is a way to get the foot in the door, and for others it can be the business model itself.
Take, for example, how many VPNs do business. Many VPNs will offer their customers eighty to ninety percent off on a subscription to the VPN, hoping that the customer will find the subscription useful enough to keep after the discounted subscription expires. Discounts and offers are a great way to pull a customer in, and communicating these discounts via email is a good way to get it across.
Sending an email to your mailing list which features your product or service at a discount is a great way to get reluctant customers to take the plunge, but making it creative and unique is difficult. Many people see the fifty percent off in the header of an email and write it off as a marketing tactic.
A better way to grab consumer attention would be to add in urgency and personalization to the email. Try mentioning to the customer that it is because of some kind of action they may (or may not) have taken that has led to an exclusive offer. For example, they can get fifty percent off of their first purchase of your product or service because they’ve been subscribed to your mailing list for a year.
Using these personalized tactics works well because it adds urgency beyond just time but also creates a sense of loyalty in the consumer, who may not have even been aware that they were on the mailing list for a year.
This is obviously more work than a canned email, but if you’re willing to put in the time, you could come up with some creative email marketing ideas to use with incentives.
Garnering Attention Using Calls to Action
A call to action is giving some kind of request to do something to your email recipient. This often is something like subscribing to a newsletter, making an account, or confirming a purchase for an unconfirmed cart. Calls to action are surprisingly effective because it places agency in the hands of the consumer.
If the goal of your email campaign is to get a survey filled out so you can better understand your demographic, for example, then adding a call to action can help with getting your viewers to actually do the survey. Compare a simple text line with a hyperlink to a survey to a command like “let us know your opinion” or “help us better our platform.”
These calls to action are usually imperative sentences rather than questions since they provide more urgency than a question. An easy enough way to get people to take surveys more readily is to provide an incentive, as previously discussed, but a punchier call to action that draws in curiosity can work just as effectively too.
Using creative, and brand-consistent calls to action can increase customer interaction and customer loyalty especially. Depending on your target demographic, techniques like comedy or straightforward business talk can especially help to make your viewers feel like they’re being talked to personally: personalization is the game here.
Particularly with younger or inattentive audiences, flashy and moving images around a call to action help significantly with garnering attention. Creative email marketing ideas like what Postmates, among others, does with GIF files in their emails do a great job of grabbing younger demographic eyes.
Showing your viewers what their call to action will get them on the screen also incentivizes it well. If your email campaign is for a charity, showing the status of the charity before and after their action has a profound effect.
If a donation, or a survey, or any such call to action will create a positive change in the world, show this to your consumer before they do it. This way, they will feel as if their action created meaningful change. If your company is not a charity, then show how their life will be improved with the action they will soon take.
Effective Goal Choices for the Email Medium
Choosing what to accomplish using creative email marketing ideas is difficult. Emails are a blank canvas on which your campaign can be drawn. Some email campaigns just seek to communicate software updates, and others are trying to actively sell a product or service to its mailing list.
Regardless of your goal, what matters is actually having one, particularly a smart goal.
Measuring the success of your email campaign, and knowing how to adapt it to fit its potential shortcomings, or capitalizing on its strengths is important to creating a series of successful campaigns.
If your goal is to reach as many inboxes as possible, your focus should be creating emails that are not considered spam and which actually get opened by their viewers. Using creative subject lines is paramount to success in this case.
The way of the future for good subject lines is emojis and personalization in the form of a name.
While usage of emojis may not fit the branding of some companies, the usage of personalization should be universally available across any company. Names draw attention, as do emojis, and in combination, a name with some urgency can pull eyes across the screen.
How this ties into goals is in how creative email marketing ideas need to be measured in their success or failure. You may find that you are reaching more inboxes or that your emails are being opened more, but is that real success, and does it translate into further gains for your company?
It may be the case that having your emails sent to more inboxes results in no actual capital gains. So, what would be a wiser goal for an email campaign? Maybe to increase revenue from sales made via email links.
You should be able to track which of your customers came to your site via a link in an email versus other sources. Sending out emails is a much cheaper alternative to purchasing advertising on sites or social media, so reducing costs by changing traffic flow to email instead of alternative sources may be a more measurable goal than the previously mentioned inbox goal.
Regardless of your goal, it is important that it be measurable in a tangible way, and that it have purpose behind it. A goal that does not actually lead to a stronger business is ultimately a pointless goal.
Innovating Using Other People’s Ideas
While theft of ideas is certainly a bad idea, personal adaptation and strategic borrowing is always useful for any company. Try subscribing to the newsletters of some of your competitors, or other companies that target a similar demographic to yours. See what they do and try to adapt it to your brand and style.
Taking from your competitors is not just as simple as copy and paste though. Learning what aspects of their email bring them attention is the important part. In order to avoid any claims of copying, be sure also to only copy the concepts of your competitors rather than ripping out particular pieces.
Say your competitors are using GIFs or emojis. Firstly, you’ll want to check that this style lines up well with your own brand before bringing it over to your company. An obvious copy is all too easy to spot, so try to keep it subtle. Sometimes, the best creative email marketing ideas come from already existing email marketing campaigns. Try tracking the email campaigns of your competitors over a long term and see how they evolve as they achieve their goals.
Assuming that they have set a long-term strategic goal for themselves, try to guess at what they’re looking to accomplish and how they’re planning to do it. If their goal aligns with yours, you may find that their exact strategy may just be what you need.
Many companies today are using more personalized and punchy subject lines to attract people towards actually opening and clicking their emails. Using similar subject line templates and techniques can help you to remain in competition with your competitors, and allow you to add your own touch to what you send out.
Paying attention to the incentives and calls to actions that your competitors use is also useful for garnering new techniques to attract consumer attention.
Using an Email Marketer Online
Some companies online provide email marketing services for you. Although these companies will charge you a fee, you can effectively outsource your needs so that you get all the benefits of well-planned creative email marketing ideas without all the time-consuming work.
This decision is up to you, and keep in mind that with an email marketer, you get what you put it. The more details you give to them, the better they can fulfill your needs.
Different marketers will provide different levels of service for different prices. Check out your options online. You may even find some ideas by looking at the email marketing of the email marketers themselves.
Studying your Demographics
Paying close attention to who your emails are actually reaching is deeply useful to the success of your email campaign. Having accurate statistics for your email campaign is difficult, but you should know your own market’s demographics better than anyone, so guessing at it shouldn’t be too hard.
An older market will not be particularly interested in flashy GIFs, and a rich market won’t be interested in discounts or coupons. Meanwhile, the opposite is true for young and poor markets, respectively.
If your market spans many demographics, you may even find it useful to create personalized emails to match each of your demographic groups and sending out these demographic-matched emails to each demographic group in bulk. The more effort that goes into personalization, the better your emails will perform, generally speaking.
Successful Email Marketing in an Evolving Market
Emails may feel a bit old-fashioned these days, but their inexpensive starting costs and cross-demographic reach is of great use to just about any company. Everyone has an email, and everyone checks their email, making email marketing a powerful tool.
The problem with it is that everyone sends out emails. Many people have thousands of unread emails that sit in their inboxes for years, and those people likely won’t take the time to sift through it all looking for interesting advertisements. Some companies’ emails get stuck in the junk box, never to see the light of the screen.
The success of your email campaign hinges on creating interesting subject lines that can attract readers’ attention and on providing powerful incentives that encourage your viewers to interact with your company in a meaningful way. Along with this, calls to action that encourage your consumer to visit the site or participate in surveys create loyalty and brand recognition among your customers.
These valuable marketing commodities can come at a high price with other marketing techniques, but through email, they are inexpensive. If you really want to get a successful marketing campaign rolling without all the heavy-lifting, using an email marketing company online could be of great use to you in particular.
Understanding how to learn from your competitors, and understanding the demographic makeup of your market is necessary for proper personalization of your emails and is important for maintaining a competitive advantage in an ever-evolving market.
The question is not whether email marketing is good for your company, it is what kind of email marketing your company needs.