Email is a great way to grow your business, but it has one big drawback: many of the folks who get your email may be totally unfamiliar with your company, your products and your services. To capture the attention of these newbies and get them to pay attention, opt in, or even sign up for your newsletter, you will first have to find them, then serve up a compelling offer with a great design.
Good List
Who is the ideal customer for this particular email offer? Once you define your ideal customer, you can build your email mailing list by (1) scrubbing your internal email lists to create a targeted email campaign list and/or (2) you can purchase an email list from a broker to augment your house list. Multiple sources insure that the final email list is fresh and make it much more likely that you will get good results.
Compelling Offer
Your email must contain a compelling offer that is relevant to the audience and has a high perceived value. Example offers could be knowledge (e.g., download a whitepaper or sign up for a webinar), a special price/offer on a service, or a contest or a discount coupon.
The offer must be easy to understand and sign up must be easy. Be crystal clear about the value of your offer and how to get it.
Creative Design
Like your offer, your email design has to be creative and to the point. People scan emails first, and only read them if they are interested. So make your email design an attention-getter.
Here are some quick email design tips:
- Engage more people with images or videos
- Use pleasing colors and nothing too jarring
- Make your first two sentences as strong and compelling as possible
- Restate your offer two or three times
- Use buttons for user action
A good list, a strong offer and stellar email design will increase your open rates and put you on the road to attracting new business leads. Good luck with your email prospecting efforts!