First tip: Your email subject line must catch your audience.

Email marketing is an important strategy in any marketing campaign. As I wrote a while ago, email is the earliest form of social media marketing, predating Facebook, LinkedIn, and numerous populating the social media universe. Email is also the most personal, since companies, especially retailers and restaurants, can craft e-mails with interesting headlines and content that is based on each individual consumer’s unique purchasing history.

It’s also not going away. According to research from The Radicati Group, “The number of worldwide email accounts continues to grow from over 4.1 billion accounts in 2014 to over 5.2 billion accounts by the end of 2018. The total number of worldwide email users, including both business and consumer users, is also increasing from over 2.5 billion in 2014 to over 2.8 billion in 2018.” With the rise of smartphones and iPads to complement desktops and laptops, people have various devices on which they can check their e-mail.

How can marketers take advantage of this?

Short subject lines. Your email’s subject line should be short and to the point. What is the gist of the email? What are you trying to inform your audience about? Take that idea and break it down to come up with your subject line.

Be natural and personal. Your email should sound natural, instead of it being written by a robot. Of course, it should now sound like speech off the street. At the same time, your email should come across as personal, which will help you gain your reader’s trust.

Keep it short. Sometimes, marketers try to overload their readers with too much information and/or offerings in a one email, which inevitably means the length of the email will be too long. Keep it short and, like the subject line, concise. Have only one offering if there is an offering.

Let it skim. With how busy people are these days, they will not read an email all the way through if it is not a personal email. Arrange your email so that the reader can quickly grasp what you are communicating. Use bullets, lists, and short sentences to let the reader quickly get the main point.

Call-to-action. This tip is one that many people know to include, yet many people don’t. A call-to-action, such as buy, subscribe, or start now instills the urge to click.

Not sure how to reach your target audience through email? Contact SPARKS! to see how we can help you.