Get People To Read Your Bulk Emails
Mass Emailing is a great way to communicate with customers. By sending out targeted emails to your contacts and customers with information they might even want to receive promotions, notifications, industry news….all the stuff that might interest people who are interested in your company, subject or business. According to recent studies mass emailing provides the second best return on investment behind money invested in search engine optimization. However, nearly all of us get too many emails, so we skim through them quickly to determine what we want to read. This means that what the user first sees has to catch their attention.
Grab Their Attention With The First Few Lines
Obviously the subject is important. In the book ‘Inbound Marketing’, Brian Halligan recommends that you think of the headlines from supermarket tabloids. Perhaps a little over the top, but catchy and meaningful subjects will grab the users attention. In current versions of Outlook and many other email programs, users often read emails in preview pane, which lets them quickly read emails. On the right is what an image based email looks like in the default settings of Outlook with images hidden (with the companies name hidden by the black rectangles to retain their privacy). As you can see there is nothing to see. No content, nothing to make the user open the email other than the sender’s name. Sure a catchy title (would you look at ‘National Enquirer’ or ‘Mom with 2 heads gives birth to 4 headed child’?) will help grab the users attention, but if they are in a hurry the user might not download pictures. You could assume that the customer will look at your emails because they like you…but if your sending out mass emails how often is the average busy user going to click on something just to find out if what you are sending them might work?
Many mass emailers use big, splashy pictures. Great for catching the user’s attention, but to save file size, track downloads and display consistently mass email programs post the images on the internet and just send a link. In order to maintain privacy, many email clients like Outlook don’t display the pictures. The solution…
Use Smaller Pictures To Accent Your Message
The text is readable right away, so it needs to contain enough catchy information that your client will be interested enough to read the rest of the email, download actions and take whatever action you want them to take.
Keep Important Content “Above the Fold”
Another issue with preview pane as well as smaller computer screens and, increasingly, phones and tablets, is that the important information needs to be high on the page. You have to catch the user’s attention or they will go on to the next thing. This means small headers (or no headers).
Does this mean you shouldn’t use pictures? No. Pictures may not be worth a thousand words in email, but they do add color and context. However, the gist of your message should be contained in the text of your email and the pictures should augment the text.
Bower Web Solutions is glad to help you create an email template that will make your emails as readable as possible as well as work on your message and even add landing pages on your website to get your email prospect to convert into customers.
