According to Charles Edge, Director of Professional Services at Jamf, “Email marketing is a delicate business. On one hand, you don’t want to be an evil spammer. On the other, email is an efficient way to stay in touch with potential and existing customers.” This is a pretty valuable demonstration of the balancing act that marketing professionals have to walk every day when it comes to crafting emails. However, many manage not only to succeed, but to thrive, which is why email marketing is considered tohave the highest ROI of all digital marketing. Here are some prominent examples of email marketing content that manages to hit those important notes.
Buffer
To start the conversation, we’re going to cover a basic welcoming email that Buffer sends to people who sign up for its list. A good first impression counts for a lot, and this where Buffer excels. Keeping it simple with a welcome to the “Buffer family” and links to their social media profile, it lets readers know they are appreciated without taking up too much of their time. Links to the social media make perfect sense, considering that Buffer is a social media sharing app. Depending on your company, you may want to take a different approach, like including links to an e-book or whitepaper that you wrote. In general, a friendly welcome and added value are a good one-two punch.
Charity.Water
Charity.Water is a bit unique on this list, taking donations to help supply water in poorer countries. The lesson we can learn here, though, is about the power and value of automation in email marketing. One of the biggest issues people tend to have about donating is the fact that they don’t have a concrete idea of how their money is going to help those in need. Charity.Water uses email marketing to deal with that issue, using automated emails to update donors on how their projects are going and how they are helping people. This uses email marketing tools to reinforce their brand values in a useful and aesthetically pleasing way, with plenty of pictures and charts. Those who want to skim and those who want to read in full can both understand the email’s content.
Lifehacker
Lifehacker and the rest of its network of sites follow a similar format for its newsletters that bucks the traditional trends of putting several different articles in a straight line. To try and break things up, it uses different content blocks of various sizes. The advantage here is that not only can you emphasize certain articles to get as much traffic as possible, but, as they do, this leaves blocks for other areas like sponsored content. If you wish to emulate this style yourself, you’ll ideally want to start by keeping things to two or three basic formats. If you’re just starting out, you don’t want to confuse your audience by swapping out a different format every day.
The Hustle
Ellie Johnson, Marketing Operations Associate at SendGrid, mentions that The Hustle is one of the few emails that she ends up opening every day. “They send a healthy dose of news that I don’t necessarily get reading the BBC that keeps me opening every day. Their tone is casual, and their writing is witty without dumbing down the content or making light of heavy topics.” However, in her eyes, the key to success is subject line copy. The key, as Johnson puts it, is a combination of headlines that are both amusing and tie back to the lead story in the email. This is a perfect example of walking that balance that Edge mentioned earlier. The Hustle uses humor to stand apart, but makes sure that it is relevant to avoid readers feeling like they are “baited” into opening your email.
Missguided
Being able to evoke emotion is a part of good writing, and Missguided managed to hit this nerve for its reactivation copy. Using a personal tone with emojis manages to get the desired emotional response (making the person consider reactivating) while keeping things lighthearted rather than maudlin.
All of these are examples of successful email content that drives clicks and conversions, but it’s not as simple as just copying what they offer in order to translate that to your business. Each good piece of email content is both crafted and targeted towards a specific audience. Just like any other marketing initiative, make sure you have a concrete and viable look at what type of consumers you are trying to reach.
Ryan Velez is a Health Content Specialist with Article-Writing.co and freelance writer/editor from central New Jersey, with a background in B2B journalism and health writing. Since picking up freelancing in 2015, he’s worked with clients from different fields and across the globe to create informative and appealing content. When not writing, he’s always trying to scope out a new restaurant to visit.