By Libby Esterle, Senior Account Executive

Over the summer I shared some best practices and recommendations for leveraging social media at events and figured a nice follow up would be to do the same for email marketing. Much like websites, email marketing is here to stay and, when used strategically and thoughtfully, it can be a vital resource to maintain and build a loyal customer base and generate and convert leads.

To ensure your email marketing strategy is on point and successful, here are some best practices to consider:

Create consistency in content, frequency and design.

Start by determining what you’ll highlight in your email marketing and how often you’ll reach out. Will you have a feature story? Client testimonials? A new product or service spotlight? Information about an event? Links to other relevant resources? And is one a month sufficient? Or are weekly touch points better?

Your overall look, design and brand should appear consistent across all of your platforms as well, including emails. Stick to the same logo, colors, and visuals that best represent your brand so customers immediately recognize who you are and what you do.

Keep it short and sweet.

When looking at social media, users rarely stop their scroll, so keeping things simple, clear, and concise is the way to go. And while emails can include multiple sections, the content itself shouldn’t be too long. Research has found 200 words should be the maximum for your largest section. Other smaller sections can be a couple sentences, or even a couple words with a photo or link.

Pull people in.

People get a LOT of emails, so it’s essential to make yours stand out. Engaging subject lines, interesting visuals, photos, and videos, are simple ways to make sure your email is noticed.

Speaking of catchy subject lines – following are just a few examples that work well get people’s attention:

• Ask an intriguing question: “Who was Wonder Woman’s role model?”
• Create a sense of urgency: “Cruisin’ 4 Critters is August 2: Register Today!”
• Highlight a new product or new content: “Reel Works Kickstarter – New Video!”
• Use humor, and/or a play on words: “Sweet dreams are made of cheese”

Stay tuned for more tips in a future blog re: Practice Makes (Email Marketing) Perfect, Part II coming soon!