Daily Worth's email come through Constant Contact.
Competition is everywhere, including your customer’s Inbox. For your company email to be read you have to stand out. Do you?
The good news is there email enhancement tools available to make you shine. Sounds like a face-lift, doesn’t it? It pretty much is.
This email makes me hungry. Firebirds uses Fishbowl.
Sending customers email piggy backs onto your existing marketing and any social Facebook or Tweeting you’re doing. Email is a place the majority of your customers spend time. You want to show up where they have their attention, and so many people spend time in email.
Email marketing tool platforms help you make the most of that attention. They are a category that is a bridge between traditional marketing formats and social formats. I think of them as pretty email makers. They give you design tools beyond bold, italic and font style. You can insert and position elements other than text: images, video links, links to your blog, website or Facebook and plenty of color, anywhere you want. AND they are simple to use. Templates are part of the programs, you can customize them to match your existing website or retail color scheme. It’s a little like using Lego blocks except you can also change colors, make noise and escape through a rabbit hole.
The result of the design components is visual texture. Regular emails don’t have that, they are flat and dull. With design elements your message becomes more interesting to look at, easier to absorb because it is visually organized, that makes it nicer to spend time with and more stimulating than plain black letters on a white screen.
Some of the brands in this space are:
- Constant Contact
- MailChimp
- Emma
- Cheetahmail from Experian
They are all available for download. Over the next month I’ll do a post on each one to give you a sense of which ones you want investigate.
Anthropologie uses Cheetahmail for a artsy look.
Each brand’s version is different and yet accomplishes the same thing. Each has its own strength and personality; each has a weakness. Explore and play around – most give you a free trial. Or give me a buzz and I’ll point you in the right direction based on your business.
So making attractive email helps you win the battle of share of mind. The beauty of using one of these tools is you can tell if your email gets the readers attention AND how they interact with it. The reporting capabilities of each platform let you see how many of the emails you sent were opened and which links got clicked on most. How does that help you? It tells you more about what your customer likes. Every time you send an email you learn more about what makes your customer tick, and you can tailor your next email accordingly.
So no more ugly emails! Make them count.
I agree. I’m a big fan of MailChimp. But I’ve seen pretty emails fail miserably. Each email sent must be completely thought out. What is the emails purpose? What do you want the reader to do once they open the email? The email needs to capture attention, have a clear and concise message, and a specific call to action.
Absolutely! If it gets read, and it wasn’t worth the readers time, they will remember, possibly unsubscribe. As a general rule I guide my clients to be sure the content makes their reader smarter on some topic.
Carla