Your click-through rates depend heavily on how well your copywriting engages subscribers. If they find your content boring or otherwise not worth their time, they may even decide to stop opening your emails or unsubscribe from your list. The good news is that you can polish your copywriting by making sure each email demonstrates these characteristics.

Be Personal

Email is inherently more personal than social media or blogging. People tend to guard their email addresses jealously, so when they sign up for your email list they’re displaying a certain level of trust and interest in what you have to say. Take that trust seriously and treat them as the valued customers they are. Send birthday emails, thank you emails, special offers, and whatever else you can think of to let your subscribers know you view them as individuals.

Remember, Your Subject Line is Copy Too

It’s easy to tack the subject line on at the last minute without giving it much thought. But doing so could be detrimental to your email campaign by sabotaging your open rates. Pay attention to things like simple, concise action wording, being straightforward, and not looking like spam.

Be Conversational

Don’t sound overly formal or salesy when you’re writing email copy. Let your subscribers know that you’re a person too, and include details that highlight a personality rather than merely a corporation. Talk about your latest blog post, your daughter’s birthday, or a special person who inspired you—anything to create a connection between you and the reader.

Provide Content That Benefits the Reader

Benefit doesn’t always have to be monetary. Give the reader something to make him laugh, pique his interest, tell him something he didn’t know, or tell him a story that means something to you. These types of emails capture interest and as an added bonus, they often inspire the subscriber to forward your email to friends and family who might become subscribers themselves. Of course, you can also provide benefit by offering discounts, freebies, or sneak previews of sale events.

Always Include a Call to Action

No matter how great your email is, the subscriber is unlikely to click through to your website if you don’t give him a reason for doing so. Ask the reader to take action in every email you send using compelling wording and a great incentive.

eConnect Email can help with you with every stage of the email creation process. Upload and manage images, implement customizable templates, preview how content will look in the inbox, personalize your messages, and insert content snippets into emails all from one centralized location.

Auto-responders make it easy to stay on top of key aspects of your email campaign. Most companies use an auto-responder to welcome new subscribers, but these email gems are often overlooked when it comes to other types of contact. Ready to branch out? Consider using auto-responders in the following instances to help you stay connected with your subscribers.

Event News

Event registration, confirmation, announcements, and reminders can all be automated to reduce the workload for you while keeping your subscribers informed at the same time. Whether you’re planning a conference or a sales event, auto-responders will help you get the news out on time.

Birthday Offers

You don’t have to be a restaurant to send birthday offers. People love to feel special on their birthdays, so take advantage of that natural inclination toward opening this type of email and offer a discount or freebie to every member of your subscriber list using an autoresponder.

Abandoned Cart Follow-Up

How many sales does your website lose to shopping cart abandonment? Too many? Consider following up on abandoned carts with an auto-responder that reminds the subscriber of his recent searches. You can also save cart content using a cookie and send a follow-up email after a specified number of days to renew interest in those items.

Evergreen Newsletters

An evergreen newsletter uses the same content over and over again for each new subscriber. For instance, Subcribers A, B, and C will all receive the same Issue 1, Issue 2, and Issue 3, even though they each sign up three months apart. By using auto-responders to send these newsletters, you can stay connected with your new subscribers even if you don’t have time to generate unique newsletter content on a regular basis.

Loyalty Programs

Do you have a loyalty card that enables your customers to earn points or freebies based on how much they spend? Keep them shopping by sending regular reminders of how many rewards they’ve earned and how far they have to go before earning the next free item or discount.

Auto-responders are a great way to keep in touch with both new and old subscribers, long after you’ve sent the welcome email. Create customized drip-email campaigns through eConnect Email, sending emails based on the time, criteria and frequency you define. You can also use behavioral data, demographic information, or customer surveys to define email triggers that will keep your subscribers engaged and clicking.

Yahoo!’s new email visualization tool may be email marketing eye candy, but it has also revealed some noteworthy tidbits for email marketers. The map on the front page shows Yahoo! email usage volume by location as well as a continuously updated number of emails delivered every second by the Yahoo! mail network. Click on a continent, and you can receive the same information specific to that area, with additional clicks zooming in further to reveal more detailed information about the data used to determine whether a particular message lands in the inbox or the junk folder.

What Information Is Available?

Perhaps the most interesting pieces of information for email marketers are the trending keywords and the email verification criteria.

• Trending Keywords

Click on the green box on the left side of the map to view keywords showing up most often in the subject lines of emails that make it to the inbox. Click the “Show Spam Keywords” box at the bottom of the graph to see keywords appearing in messages that land in the spam folder.

• Email Verification Criteria

This information is buried a little deeper, but can be found by clicking on a continent on the main page, then on a point within that continent. Click on one of the envelopes labeled either “Junk” or “Inbox” to see a list of five criteria used to determine which emails go where, as well as a pass or fail designation for each.

What Does This Mean for Email Marketers?

Sure, it’s interesting, but can it really impact your email marketing strategy? We think it can, by offering some valuable information we could only guess at before.

• The subject line isn’t as important as you might think when it comes to spam determination. So you can forget your list of approved or banned subject line words (like “free”) as well as those odd variations that attempt to fool the filter (f.r.e.e.; f*r*e*e; f-r-e-e). The trending keyword feature demonstrates that previously anathema words like free actually show up in delivered messages a high percentage of the time. They also show up in junked messages, suggesting that subject line words might not play as important a role as once thought.

• Spam filters look at the email as a whole to determine in-box worthiness. Criteria such as a verified IP address, links, sender, and message content all play a part in determining which messages get marked as spam and which ones reach the inbox.

The bottom line? Stop trying to game the system and instead work towards creating engaging, useful emails that build relationships with your subscribers—the kind of emails we help clients create every day at eConnect Email.

At least a third of your subscribers will check their email on a mobile device at least some of the time. And as mobile devices get faster and more reliable, that number will mushroom. That’s good news, because it means that people access their email more often and may be more likely to open messages they receive. But it also means that they’ll be talking to the person next to them on the subway, checking their heart rate at the gym, getting ready to fall asleep in bed, and eating lunch while trying to absorb the content of their email as well.

For email designers, all those distractions mean that people aren’t paying quite as much attention to the content on screen as they used to. And because most people now have touch phones, it means that they expect to be able to do everything you need them to do with one finger—one finger that’s a lot less precise than a mouse cursor. As you think about your next email design, ask yourself these questions to make things a little easier on your mobile subscribers.

• Are clickable elements big enough?

Can your subscribers easily click on the element they want without having to expand the screen size, an action which requires two fingers and therefore two hands?

• Is there enough space between clickable elements?

When a subscriber clicks, can he easily hit the right button or do “too close” elements encourage misfires?

• Can the call to action be seen at a glance?

Have you designed your call to action so that it stands out from surrounding content? It should be big, bold, and easily tappable by either the right or left thumb.

• Is there enough contrast between text and background?

Because mobile emails will be viewed in a variety of contexts—bright sun, fluorescent light, dim home lighting—it’s essential to provide sharp contrast between text, images, and background so the subscriber never has to squint to make out your creative.

• Can subscribers easily operate your navigation bar from a mobile device?

Lots of emails do great on the creative, but then stick a tiny, barely readable navigation bar across the top of the email. Experiment with other navigation options so subscribers can find what they want more easily.

At econnect Email, we want to make your email creation process as snafu-free as possible. Use our creation templates and email testing options to create messages your subscribers can easily open, read, and interact with, no matter where they happen to be when they click.

People who perform eye tracking studies and user behavior online tell us that only 20% of your email subscribers take the time to scroll down and see content below the fold. That can be a discouraging statistic, especially if you put a lot of time into designing those emails and including information that will be of interest and use to your subscriber base. But the good news is that you can significantly affect the number of people who scroll down by incorporating some creative design elements that draw the eye downward and create interest in below the fold content.

• Non-Horizontal Lines

Both diagonal and vertical lines that extend beyond the fold can pull the eye down and put a question in the viewer’s mind about what’s down there that they can’t see. Horizontal lines have the opposite effect. They create a hard break which becomes a natural stopping point for the eye and communicates in effect “All the important stuff is above this point. Don’t bother scrolling.”

• Creative Section Breaks

Some emails naturally lend themselves to breaks between sections: portions of text, product feature blocks, coupon blocks, etc. You can soften these natural breaks by again avoiding the over-used horizontal line and trying other dividing elements such as an arrow-shape that points downward or overlapping graphics that extend past the fold.

• Partial Creative Visibility

Another way to draw the eye downward is to incorporate extra tall elements that extend beyond the bottom of the screen in your creative. Whether it’s a person, a stocking in a Christmas email, a bag full of products, or an image collage, including elements that don’t all fit on one screen creates interest in content that may be further down.

• Connective Design Elements

Dotted lines, arrow trails, treasure hunt paths, and swirly patterns can all be used to connect images and text blocks to guide the eye as it moves down the page. When these elements extend below the fold, it’s more natural to keep scrolling and see what else is next in sequence.

Take advantage of the customizable templates and design testing available from eConnect Email to create emails that keep your subscribers scrolling. With unlimited image hosting, an everything-you-need image manager, and instant image editing, you can build email creative that defies the 20% scroll statistic every time.

Email newsletters are a great way to communicate with your customer base and keep them interested in what’s happening with your company. But don’t get so enamored with newsletters that you forget all of the other excellent ways you can use email marketing to your advantage. Ready to add some spice to your email campaign? Try one of these email approaches:

• Marketing Email

Use your emails to promote sales events, offer limited time only specials, give discounts to your best customers, and remind subscribers about special deals and offer deadlines.

• How-To Email

Keep subscribers interested in the messages you send by showing them how to do something, providing expert tips on a particular topic, or building credibility with industry knowledge.

• Event Management Email

Manage both online and in-person events by using email to send invitations, provide conference or webinar details and reminders, and ask for feedback after the event. Your subscribers will love the personal, interactive touch, and you’ll love the ability to receive instant responses from subscribers.

• Branding Email

Sometimes, your subscribers just need to see your company name and logo in their inboxes in order to strengthen their familiarity and trust with your brand. Branding should be part of every email you send as you seek to retain current subscribers and make new contacts.

In addition to specific types of emails, you can also use every email you send to accomplish multiple purposes. By avoiding the rut of single-purpose emails, you can accomplish all of the following and more:

• Gain customer data

Keep an eye on key performance indicators such as open rates, click throughs, forwards, and unsubcribes for each of the various types of emails you send in order to determine which ones are most effective.

• Build relationships

People love to know you’re thinking about them. Give them chances to interact with you via email and you’ll build lasting relationships based on loyalty over the long term.

• Determine email ROI

ROI is much easier to monitor for email marketing than it is for social media venues. With a good analytics program, you can determine exactly which email formats and strategies lead to the greatest sales and conversion results.

At eConnect Email, we make monitoring your email campaigns simple using easy-to-understand analytics reports and statistics. We’ll also help you design custom emails that deliver your message in a unique and memorable format to every subscriber, every time.

With every email you send, it gets easier to fall into old habits. Before you know it, they all start to look the same, or even worse, to incorporate some flagrant email marketing errors. If you haven’t taken the time to flesh out your “To Don’t” list, start by correcting these common mistakes:

1.  Failing to Design for Mobile Devices

With roughly 20% to 30% of users checking the majority of email on their phones and almost 90% doing so at least occasionally, you can’t afford to fall off the bandwagon. To get you started, here are some quick tips that will make your next email more mobile friendly:

• Use fonts that can be easily read on tiny screens.
• Put space between clickable elements to accommodate touch screens and clumsy fingers.
• Enlarge the call to action buttons, making it stand out from surrounding content.

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People love to play online. Part of the appeal of Facebook is that it gives you so many opportunities to interact with people and with the companies you’re following. Email has traditionally been less interactive than websites or social media, but the current trend in email marketing is to enable interaction with the subscriber. That way, you can capitalize on the surfer mentality (give me something fun to do) while still taking advantage of the more personalized and intimate communication venue of email. Here are some ideas to get your subscribers involved.

• Ask for a vote

Whether it’s a vote on a new ice cream flavor, a cutest photo contest, or a new logo, asking for a vote gives readers a chance to click a button and get involved!  It also makes your subscribers feel valuable by encouraging them to influence the decision you make as a company.

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Social media has undoubtedly been in the spotlight for the last couple of years. It’s time email marketing received its due praise. While it’s true that social media can accomplish things like reaching a broad audience and encouraging conversations with customers, email marketing offers its own list of benefits that social media will never be able to emulate.

• Guaranteed Exposure

Does your post make it on your fans’ news feed? With Facebook’s algorithm, only the pages deemed most popular or relevant will make it on the “worthy to be seen” list. Even if you do make it, your post will disappear from your fans newsfeed within hours. Email, on the other hand, always makes it to your subscribers’ inboxes (forget about bounces for now), giving you a better chance of grabbing your subscribers attention with a carefully crafted subject line. In addition, even unopened emails can remain in an inbox for days, with each new visit by the subscriber an opportunity to snag his attention.

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Your call to action is arguably the most important element of your email marketing messages. Because it provides the link between passive reading and active clicking, it supersedes even the supremacy of the subject line. But many businesses fail to treat it with the respect it deserves. Subject lines tend to get all the attention because they provide the first point of contact and the incentive to open. And while that is undoubtedly a vital role, the call to action requires the subscriber to take decisive action towards your conversion goal.  That’s why it’s essential that you put some serious thought into creating a single call to action that will funnel your subscribers toward the decision you ultimately want them to make.

Why a Single Call to Action?

Simply put, too many calls to action paralyze the decision process. For instance, one email I received offered me the opportunity to donate, review new merchandise, visit the store website, and make a purchase, all in the same email. Just reading it burned through my allotted attention span for this email campaign; forget about actually deciding which call to action was most enticing. Studies show that you’ll make more sales by offering fewer choices than you will by offering a smorgasbord of options. Why? Ever try to choose between twenty-four different flavors of barbecue sauce? After a while they all start to taste the same.

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