Tag Archives: Business Email Marketing

October 24, 2019 · 2:16 pm

4 Ways to Make Your Black Friday & Cyber Monday Emails Stand Out

Is it too soon to talk about the holiday shopping season?

Not if you work in advertising, marketing, or digital commerce. After all, Black Friday and Cyber Monday— two of the biggest shopping days of the year— will be here before you know it. The time to prepare is now.

In this post, we’re going to offer some email marketing tips. You’re certainly going to want to take advantage of these prime time shopping days, sending emails to your customers and clients and stimulating some interest in current products, specials, and holiday promotions.

But here’s the thing: You’re not going to be the only one to have this great idea. All your competitors are going to be sending Black Friday/Cyber Monday emails, as well, and your customers will be deluged. The question is, how can you make your emails stand out?

We’ve got a few simple suggestions.

How to Differentiate Your Holiday Emails

Send a Teaser

First, note that you don’t have to wait until the big day to hit SEND on your marketing email.

In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to show that sending a teaser or two, a few weeks before Black Friday, can actually be really helpful.

You can send your teaser email any time now, really, letting your readers know to watch their inboxes for BIG sales and promotions.

This can increase the odds that your actual email gets opened when the time comes. And, it can give your customers and clients a reason to stay subscribed!

Emphasize Urgency

Another suggestion? Underscore the urgency of your promotions and offers. Let your readers know that they need to act now to take full advantage of your offer. Some examples of this:

  • 24-HOUR FLASH SALE!
  • One day only to save 25 percent!
  • LAST HOUR of our Cyber Monday sale!
  • Order today to ensure Christmas delivery!
  • FREE SHIPPING if you order by December 1.

Make it clear to your recipients that they can’t afford to set your email aside for later.

Extend Your Offer

Cyber Monday and Black Friday can be stressful days, even for the most seasoned shoppers. It’s not unusual for people to simply forget certain offers.

One thing you might consider is offering an extension. Send an email a day or two after Cyber Monday and tell readers you have a special surprise for them; by popular demand, you’ve decided to extend your sale or promotion for another week, etc.

Define Your Differences

Another strategy we recommend: Use your emails to outline the things that make your business different.

You’re probably not the only company to offer a particular product or service, but maybe you are the only company to offer free shipping, or moneyback-guaranteed satisfaction, or expert installation, or a 24/7 support line, or whatever else.

Make these differences clear! Give shoppers a reason to choose you over the competition.

Start Planning Your Holiday Marketing Efforts TODAY

The bottom line: Some of us are still trying to decide what we’re going to be for Halloween this year… but remember, the holiday shopping season always arrives sooner than you think. Don’t be caught off-guard. Start planning your email marketing strategy today.

Our team can help. Reach out to Grammar Chic, Inc. if you’d like to chat. Hit us up at www.grammarchic.net or 803-831-7444.

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March 1, 2018 · 11:17 am

Nobody’s Opening Your Marketing Emails. Here’s Why.

Email marketing is growing in its popularity and in its prevalence—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that marketers know what they’re doing. It’s as possible as ever to sink a lot of money into an email marketing campaign and get nothing out of it whatsoever.

This can happen for a few different reasons—poor tracking and lead capturing, unclear goals, or email content that doesn’t deliver any benefit to the reader. An even more fundamental and common problem is that marketing emails never get opened in the first place, either winding up in spam folders or in the trashcan.

Of course, a marketing email that’s never opened is a total waste of your ad dollars—so if you find that your open rate is criminally low, it’s good to ask yourself why that might be.

Here are some of the most common reasons.

Mysterious Subject Lines

Have you ever received an email from an unknown sender with a vague or cryptic subject line, and opened it out of pure curiosity? Probably not. Most of us only take the time to open emails when we know there’s something inside that we need to see. Your email’s subject lines should promise clear value; they should spell out what the email is about and why readers should care. A mysterious subject line is almost never a good one.

Wasting Space and Wasting Time

Do you reveal your business name in the sender line, the subject line, and then the opening sentence of each email you send? That’s redundant; it’s a waste of space; and, most critically, it’s a waste of your reader’s time. People don’t have a lot of time to read emails that don’t offer immediate value, so use your space wisely. Avoid vain repetition.

All About You

We’re constantly seeing emails with an opening sentence like this: “I wanted you to be the first to know about the new business I’m launching.” Or: “We have a new e-book on the way, and I wanted you to be the first to hear about it.” Look: Nobody really cares what you want. Your email readers want to know what’s in it for them. Marketing emails should focus on benefits, benefits, and benefits—period. Get to those benefits right away.

Names in Subject Lines

Have you ever received an email with your name in the subject line? If not, it’s because such emails have all ended up in your spam folder. Because only spammers use this tactic. Again, don’t waste space in your subject line with things your reader already knows. Get straight to the point, and to the value.

Write Emails That Get Read—and Get Results

Value-focused subject lines are an important start if you want your marketing emails to be read—and our team can help you create them. Grammar Chic, Inc. offers a full range of email marketing services, from content development to execution to tracking and reports. We’d love to talk with you about the value we can offer. Contact us today to schedule a consultation: 803-831-7444 or www.grammarchic.net.

 

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January 5, 2018 · 8:00 am

How to Write Emails That Move the Sales Needle

It’s easy to send an email—and it can cost you basically nothing. Your company can send a limitless number of marketing emails, hoping for the best—but if that’s the approach you take, you’ll find that your emails fall on deaf ears. In fact, you’ll probably find that they never get opened at all.

Just because emails are perceived as cheap and mundane doesn’t mean you should be careless in how you send them. With the right approach, marketing emails can be more than just inbox filler. They can actually move your sales needle and improve your bottom line.

How? By accomplishing a few things:

  1. First, your emails actually have to be opened and read.
  2. Your emails need to go to the right people.
  3. Your emails need to offer something of value.
  4. Finally, your emails need to earn the trust of each recipient.

Maybe that sounds like a tall order, but with the right email marketing strategy, these goals are totally attainable. Here’s how.

Get Your Subject Line Right

Remember, your marketing emails won’t accomplish anything if they don’t get read. And that largely comes down to the subject line. Your subject line sets the tone and establishes the first impression for each email you send—and a good subject line will entice the recipient to explore your message. That’s how you get your emails to be opened and read.

So what does a good subject line look like? For one thing, it’s succinct. According to one study, the best length for an email subject line is four words. Does that mean every email you send needs to have a four-word subject line? No—but you should definitely shoot for brevity.

As for the substance of your subject lines, make sure you avoid clichés. Emoji and overtly salesy language tend not to grab anyone’s attention. Instead, convey the value of your message. What does it say, or what kind of offer does it include? How will the recipient be better off for opening your message?

That’s what you should convey in your subject line—in as brief and punchy a way as you can.

Send Your Emails to the Right People

Another key to getting your emails opened and read is to make sure they go to the right people. Before you hit send, know who you’re sending to.

Accomplish this by keeping a well-curated email list. There are different ways to do this. Maybe you have lists for low-quality and high-quality leads; for returning customers and new leads. At Grammar Chic, Inc., we have distinct aspects of our business—resume writing and content marketing, for example—where the subject matter overlap is pretty minimal. Thus, we maintain separate email lists, only sending resume-related stuff to jobseekers, not to our friends who work in marketing.

Well-curated email lists are key for ensuring that, when someone receives your message, it contains something that speaks to them.

Make Your Emails Valuable

Finally, your emails must earn the trust of each recipient. To put it another way, you need to show that you respect your recipient’s time. Remember that the people who receive your emails probably receive a ton of messages over the course of the day. They have little patience for something that simply hogs space in their inbox. Rather than sending them a bunch of cursory messages day in and day out, send messages judiciously—and make sure each one really counts.

And to make a message count, you need to make sure it offers something of value. Value, of course, can come in many different forms—among them:

  • An offer for a white paper, guide, or other downloadable offer
  • A discount code or coupon
  • A first look at a new product or service, before it’s been unveiled anywhere else
  • Carefully curated, value-adding clips from your company blog

The bottom line? Don’t waste anyone’s time. Give them something that speaks to their needs and shows that you’re looking out for them—not just trying to hock your wares.

Write Emails That Improve Your Bottom Line

Good emails don’t just get read; they convert, in one way or another. As such, they can actually move your sales needle. We’d love to show you more about how that’s done. Reach out to Grammar Chic’s email marketing experts for a consultation. Call us at 803-831-7444, or visit our website at www.grammarchic.net.

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November 6, 2017 · 11:29 am

5 Tips for Email Marketing Success This Holiday Season

During the holiday season, many companies kick their email marketing efforts into overdrive, seeking to capitalize on the frenzy of end-of-the-year shopping.

This is certainly a season in which email marketing can get results—but it’s not the volume of emails you send that matters. What matters is your strategy. In this post, we’ll offer five best practices for sending holiday season emails that truly move the sales needle.

Make Things Easy for Your Customers

First and foremost, make sure that your marketing emails make the sales process easier—not harder. If your email simply functions as another cumbersome step on the consumer’s journey, it’s only going to aggravate, not entice.

Your emails should provide a clear incentive to buy one of your products or services. This means including a high-quality, appealing image, if at all possible. It means listing benefits the consumer can expect—speaking directly to their pain points and your value proposition. (Always ask: what’s in it for them?)  Include links to your products and services, rendering it as easy as possible for your readers to click through and complete their purchase.

Don’t Forget Content!

Your emails should always be selling your products, your services, and your brand—yet it is also important to educate and inform. Build trust, and show your authority.

There are different ways to do this, of course. You can send out holiday shopping guides, include videos for product demos, or repurpose blog content that you think will offer value to your readers. The important thing is to make your emails more than just sales pitches. Give away some free value even to those who don’t purchase from you right away.

Send Coupons

During the holiday season, promos, sales, and discounts are everywhere—and if you want to remain competitive, it’s important that you sweeten the deal for your customers, however you can. Coupon codes are great for ensuring your emails are read, not flat-out discarded.

Target Your Emails

It’s always important to match your emails to your audience. Segmenting your contact list and sending emails to different groups—those who have bought products before, hot leads, different demographic groups—allows you to be precise in your messaging and specific in your value proposition.

Consider Your Timing

We said before that you don’t necessarily want to barrage your audience with one email after another. As such, it’s important to get your timing right, as you’ll have limited opportunities to engage your readers. Waiting too late into the season risks that your recipients are burned out on the holidays, while emailing too early might mean your emails get discarded by buyers not yet ready to consider the shopping season.

You’ve got to thread the needle—and Grammar Chic, Inc. can help. We’re seasoned marketing professionals with ample experience writing emails as well as developing effective email strategy. We’d love to help you get your holiday email campaign on track. Contact us today at www.grammarchic.net or 803-831-7444.

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July 8, 2016 · 3:45 pm

Make Your Email Marketing a Summer Success

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Here’s a phenomenon you may have noticed: During the grueling hot months of summer, you’re much more likely to get out-of-office auto-responders from the people you try to reach by e-mail. It’s not that everyone’s avoiding you. It’s just that everyone’s on vacation—or so it seems, sometimes. Certainly, the summer season is touch-and-go when it comes to emails, which may tempt you to pack in your email marketing campaign for the summer, perhaps revisiting the ol’ email list when September rolls around.

That’s not an illegitimate temptation, nor is it necessarily a wrong one: Certainly, there is an argument to be made for scaling back on your marketing emails during the summer months, if not disbanding them completely.

No matter how many marketing emails you send over the next couple of months, though—just one or a baker’s dozen—we encourage you to implement some simple tweaks to your strategy, which can make those emails much more enticing to your recipients—and thus, likely to get opened and acted upon.

Get Your Marketing Emails Ready for Summer

Keep those subject lines succinct. A lot of your readers may be getting those emails while they’re waiting in line for movie tickets, a plane ride, or a trip down a roller coaster. They don’t have time for epic-length headings. Shoot for subject lines between 30 and 50 characters—never any more.

Cozy up to emojis! Summer time is fun time, right? There’s no better season to adorn your subject lines and your email messages with a few tasteful smiley faces or other festive icons. Don’t go overboard, and don’t sacrifice actual words for emojis, but do feel free to use them as they fit.

Resist the temptation toward click bait. Drop two swimsuit sizes in a week’s time may seem like a tempting promise, and if your product can actually deliver it, then good for you! Don’t fall into the trap of making cheap promises that you know you can’t keep, though, nor of writing subject headings that aren’t actually relevant to your content. You may get click-throughs, but you’ll also get a lot of annoyed customers.

Don’t let your emails fall into the junk pile. Nobody has a lot of time to sort through their junk folder, so avoid letting your emails end up there. Cut down on spam triggers, as we talked about in this previous post.

Need some further assistance getting your marketing emails summer-ready? We can help you strategize, write, format, and send. Reach out to Grammar Chic today at 803-831-7444 or www.grammarchic.net.

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February 18, 2015 · 11:31 am

Three Ways to Keep Your Marketing E-mails Short

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Let’s start this one with a hypothetical. Imagine it’s a Tuesday morning, around 11:45. You’re in your office, just preparing to head to the car to go meet a client for lunch. As you walk out the door you flip to your phone to check your e-mail. You have a couple of new messages, and both of them are for e-mail lists you’ve signed up for. We’ll call them the e-mail lists for Company A and Company B.

Company A has sent you an exhaustive missive that details everything about their new line of products—eight products in total, with a full paragraph of information on each one of them. The full e-mail is more than 700 words!

Company B has sent you a quick reminder to call them if you have any needs they can meet. Their e-mail is exactly three sentences long, including a call to action. It totals 35 words.

Our questions for you are two. The first question: How likely are you, really, to read the e-mail from Company A? One glance at that litany of text and you’re probably going to swipe it into your trashcan. It’s not that you’re uninterested per se—but really, who has the time?

Our second question: Don’t you think it’s pretty likely that you will read the e-mail from Company B, at least if the headline is compelling enough for you to open it in the first place? Reading 35 words takes only slightly more time than it does to delete the message; why not give it a cursory scan?

And that’s the point here: E-mail marketing tends to be the most significant and successful form of content marketing, yet it’s the e-mails that are short and sweet that get the best results. And that brings us to the topic du jour: How do you ensure that your marketing e-mails are as brief, as lean, and as focused as possible?

We have three quick tips for you:

  1. Treat your e-mail like a landing page. A landing page is a piece of Web content that’s designed to do one thing and one thing only—to convert customers and get them to take a specific action, whether it’s to sign up for an e-mail list, buy a specific product, or download an e-Book. A landing page is focused on just one topic and getting the reader to take just one action, and as such a landing page is always going to be extremely direct and uncluttered. Use the landing page mentality as a guide for your marketing e-mails.
  2. Let images do the talking. A picture’s worth… well, you know. Images can make great marketing e-mail fodder; a quick piece of graphic text can be more attention-grabbing than a full written paragraph, and using an image forces you to keep things brief.
  3. Here’s an e-mail marketing strategy that tends to work well: Provide the first three or four sentences of a really great new company blog post, as a kind of a teaser, and then redirect readers to the blog itself for more information—“Click here to read the rest.” Not only does this drive traffic to your blog, but it also helps ensure your e-mail message is short and snappy.

E-mail marketing works—especially when it gets to the point. For assistance with any of this, contact the Grammar Chic, Inc. team at your convenience! Call 803-831-7444, or visit www.grammarchic.net.

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