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Email Copywriting Best Practices: Use your email copy to ‘talk’ not sell

Marketing is all about engaging your subscribers while educating them about the different products/services you offer, in the hopes that they contribute to your revenue with a purchase. The level of engagement changes based on where your subscriber is currently at on your customer journey, and it also dictates when the customer progresses to the next stage.

Emails are the best… marketing channel

Emails are the most preferred format of communications for most marketers, aiming to engage their customers, for four reasons:

Everyone, who has an online presence, has an email address
Emails have the power of reachability. All you need is the email address of your customers, and your emails shall reach their inboxes
You get the flexibility of personalizing the conversation based on the online behavior and past purchase history of your customers
Emails are an integral part in 3 out of 4 stages of the Inbound methodology

The caveat with emails is that you only have a limited time window for the content to engage the customer. At the end of the window, the customer needs to take action by clicking the call-to-action that will take them to a landing page where the customer will get more information.

Additionally, with an average person receiving 40 business emails daily (Source), it is crucial that your subscriber to engaged enough to anticipate your emails. The key to doing so is not to give out the impression that they are only a means for increasing your business revenue. Instead, you need to make them feel a part of your brand family and have a conversation with them.

This article shall shine a light on how to use your email copy to ‘talk’ to your subscribers and not sell.

Anatomy of an email copy

Before you work on writing an engaging email copy, it is essential to understand what comprises of an email copy. Most email marketers confuse email copy with the email body copy, but in fact, the body copy is a subset of the email copy. The email copy can be broken down to following email elements:

Subject Line: The first interaction of your subscriber with your email. The subject line sets the expectation of what to expect in the email
Pre-header text: A continuation of the subject line, the pre-header text is visible on most mobile email clients and selected desktop version. Use this to expand further what you started in the subject line.
Body Copy: The meat of your email, the body copy has the most chance of engaging with your customers.
The call-to-action copy: As the name suggests, the call-to-action text needs to invite the subscriber to take action.
Footer: The closing portion of your email is called the email footer. It mostly carries the email signature, unsubscribe and preference change link, physical address, and any postscript copy.
Email Signature: The email signature was an adopted practice from the times of sending letters in the past. Most people either feature a digital signature or have their name and company details as their email signature.

Bring all of them together for Email Copy Best Practices

Whether you cater to B2B or B2C, your email needs to have the storytelling ability to draw and hold on to the attention of your subscriber. The more time your subscriber spends with your email, the better are their chances for converting. Just like a good story, your email also needs a plot, a good beginning, a painful struggle in the middle, and a climax which would be a cliffhanger to build anticipation. To do so, instead of yelling about your wares, all the components of your email copy needs to come together to tell an engaging story

The Good Beginning

When someone subscribes to your emails, it is an indication that they are interested in knowing about your brand as well as your products/services. So with a compelling hook, your subscribers would be interested in engaging with your email. The engagement begins even before the subscriber opens the email. The subject line and the pre-header text are visible to your subscriber as soon as they receive your email, and those two elements help you begin your storytelling.

The ‘once upon a time’ of your email starts with your subject line. As we stated earlier, the subject line should convey what your subscribers shall expect in the email. The more self-explanatory your subject line is, the more intrigued your subscribers would be. On the contrary, cryptic subject lines such as ‘Hey’ would also increase the open rates, but they are hit-or-miss in addition to relying on persuasive email body copy to compensate.

While subject lines are crafted, the pre-header text is mostly the first few chars fetched from your email. Most marketers tend to include the pre-header text in their email code and keep it hidden to display a custom pre-header text. The role of pre-header text in your email copy is like that of black pepper in your food; not everyone may notice it, but it will enhance the flavor.

The best practices to follow for writing an engaging subject line and pre-header text are:

Build curiosity. Curiosity will always pursue people to investigate, and you can use it to your advantage when your subject line builds it. Imagine you are offering three different sets of discount to your subscribers, your subject line could be “(Offer 1), (Offer 2) or (Offer 3). Which will you get?”. This will not only convey what your email carries but also generate curiosity about what offer is in store for them.
Generate Urgency. Marketing is all about catching the early worm. If you wait for your subscribers to explore on their speed, you will lose them out to the flood of emails waiting in their inbox. Generate urgency with an actionable subject line such as “Be the first one to grab these exclusive deals.”
Address them personally. While subscribing, your subscribers provide their name along with their email address. Use it to send emails with personalized subject lines to create a facade of having a one-to-one conversation. Emails with personalized subject lines are 22% more likely to be opened.
Be Relevant. People subscribe to emails to remain updated with the latest ongoings. Reflect the relevancy in your subject lines and pre-header text. ActionRocket and Phrasee are two brands that manage to intertwine current affairs with the industry news, and the relevancy begins right from the subject line.

The conflicting middle

This is where you tell your story that you started building with your subject line. The ‘Once upon a time’ of your email gets a conflicting plot in your email copy. The email copy needs to introduce the characters of your story (i.e., your subscribers), address their conflicts, bring forth the protagonist (i.e., your services/products), and how they manage to ward off the evil (i.e., subscriber’s pain points). The email body copy can be divided into three parts:

The Pitch: This is where you set the base of your conversation and address the pain point that your subscriber may be facing. The effectiveness of your pitch depends if your subscriber manages to connect with you or if you manage to generate empathy in them.
The Agitation: Addressing the pain point is not enough. Your subscribers are looking for the solution to the pain mentioned above. You need to agitate the emotion by showing how your product /service is the solution to the problem they face. Human psychology makes people avoid the hassle, challenges, and unnecessary burdens while looking for answers.
The Hook: The point where your subscribers are supposed to take action. Assuming that your subscribers are with you till this point, the hook section of your email needs to communicate what is the next step to be taken. The call-to-action button usually follows this section.

Some of the best practices to follow for creating engaging email copy are:

Break your copy into paragraphs and bullet points for easy readability.
Refer your customer journey and buyer’s persona to understand what clicks with your subscribers. Not sure what would work? A/B test your emails.
Avoid sounding jargony. Use conversational layman tone while writing your email copy. Use sensory words such as Experience, Aroma, Flutter.
Use psychological traits to better engage with your customers, such as Fear of Missing out, Emotions associated with colors and fonts, testimonials for trust-building, etc.

The Cliffhanger Climax

An email cannot be detailed enough to fit an entire story owing to the risk of short attention span. So, the moment your subscribers are engrossed in your email copy, you have to introduce a cliffhanger. The cliffhanger, in this case, is your call to action.

The call-to-action copy needs to be actionable and should speak to the subscriber about what needs to be done to complete the story. It can be a link to the dedicated landing page or your home page, and your call to action copy needs to convey what to expect on clicking the button and convince the subscribers to take the plunge. Unfortunately, most email marketers tend to miss out the opportunity by sticking to the generic call to action copy such as ‘Click here’ or ‘Learn More.’ To learn more check out our blog on “CTA copy.”

Roll Credits and Post-credit engagement

Your email doesn’t and should never end after your call-to-action button. Email footer is the most under-rated email element that is overlooked from a marketing point of view. Most email marketers only include it to follow the CANSPAM guidelines, but your footer is also a prime area for adding a marketing plug, a first-generation pitch, or a cross-platform customer engagement opportunity.

Some of the best practices followed for Email footer are:

Always use colors or line separators to separate the footer from the email body
Use the postscript copy to ask for feedback or feature a link to your latest ebook or event details.
Include links to your social media platforms to promote it across your email subscribers
You can add a link that can be used by the subscribers to refer your newsletter with their peers. This is a great marketing trick that not many email marketers are implementing.

Even though email signature is a part of your email footer, it can be a great tool to build trust. An email signature is mostly used to sign off in an email, but by adding your image along with contact details, you associate a face with the email you send. This helps your subscribers feel like they are conversing with an actual human instead of a bot.

Final Thoughts

Nailing the email copy is often a hit-or-miss when it comes to all the subscribers in your mailing list. Following the best practices mentioned above can at least help you craft an email copy that checks off the minimum needs for engagement. While we cannot help with your email copy, our team of email developers can surely help you transform your engaging email copy into an equally attractive email template. Drop us a line at [email protected]

Email A/B testing done right: What to avoid and what to follow

Customer personas are a great way to market your products to your persona. Visitors on your website that match your customer persona are the right fit for your brand. With the advantage of personalization from the collected data of the specific visitor, you can send them the correct message at the exact time for maximum chances of conversion. You cannot wholly rely on customer persona to personalize your conversation with your customers. Irrespective of how much data you collect for personalizing your conversation, you don’t know your customers on a personal level.

A/B email testing to the rescue

To move further with sending the correct personalized experience to your customers, the need for A/B testing your emails communications comes into the picture. It involves making an educated guess by sending two variations of your email to two groups of the same sample size from your mailing list and selecting the winner based on predetermined goals. The variation can be in any of the following elements:

Subject line
Headline
Body copy
Call to action
The email layout
Personalization Level
Images
Offers
Call to action copy
Sending Times

Thankfully, conducting an A/B testing for your email campaigns doesn’t involve sending two separate emails. Most modern ESPs have the feature built-in, but you need to keep a few things in mind while conducting A/B email testing.

What to follow when A/B testing?

One of the most common reasons stated by email marketers is that they don’t know how to start with their A/B testing their email campaigns. The following is some of the familiar things you need to follow during A/B testing.

Have a solid theory to back your A/B needs up

Now that you are interested in improving your email campaign performance by A/B testing, it is essential to have a theory to back your needs. Having no strategy for A/B testing your emails is like driving a sports bike but no knowledge of driving one… you’ll crash and abandon it forever. The best place to start is understanding what do you want to achieve from your test? Increase the open rate? More conversions? Lesser unsubscribes?
Based on what goal you select, you follow the general method of approach:
Observation of the issue → Possible reason for the problem → Suggested fix → Measurement of the result

Assign the testing email element to the related metric

Once you have finalized on one goal for your A/B test, you move ahead in identifying which email elements affect the specific metric associated with the determined goal. Do you want to increase the open rate? You need to focus on subject lines, preview text, send timings. For click rates, you focus on the hero image, call-to-action placement, offer type, body copy. For conversions, the type of personalization, headline copy, or the call-to-action copy could be at fault.
If your goal is concrete, then you may not find any trouble in identifying the correct email element.

Test periodically to eliminate the novelty factor

A single A/B test would not be the single silver bullet that increases your conversions. When you introduce something new in your email, your subscribers might find it out of the ordinary, and you may observe a spike in the results. This reaction you might get would be due to the novelty and not for innovation. Periodically repeating the A/B test for the same element to get a result that is free of any novelty.
In the longer run, to confirm the effectiveness of the goals you set, it is a good practice to conduct the A/B test twice or thrice to eliminate any outside factors.

A/B testing can also have a third alternative

A/B testing shouldn’t necessarily mean testing two variations of the same email element. Provided that your mailing list is capable of being split into more than 3 chunks, you can test more variations of the same email elements. In the case of call-to-action button placement, one variation can have it in the first fold, the second variation can have it at the footer and the third variation can it after in the middle of the email after the offer pitch. While testing the effectiveness of the call-to-action colors, send a text link to one segment of your audience instead of the call-to-action button.
A/B testing doesn’t always need to be testing two variations of the same element, be innovative about it.

Optimize for the devices your customers use

Your marketing efforts need to be in the direction of where your customers are. A peek into the metrics of your email campaign can offer a plethora of information about A/B testing which elements would aid better. One such metric to examine is the device and email client that a majority of your subscribers use to read your emails. It helps you optimize your emails based on the majorly used devices. Gmail users can experiment with AMP emails that other email clients may not support. To read more about it, click here.

Test between two similar sections of the audience

A/B test results are only valuable if you are testing between two similar sections. A/B testing between a segment of newly joined leads and the customers that are buying since past year would not give any information that you can use to optimize your emails. To get an even baseline across both variants, you need to test your emails across two similar sections of the audience.
The most common segments are:

Returning visitors
New visitors
Visitors of the same location
Visitors of common traffic sources
Different devices
Different email clients

While A/B testing your email campaign, it is easy to sidetrack and do more damage than improvements to your email campaign. Most of the mistakes happen from incomplete to incorrect knowledge and life is too short for making mistakes and learning from it. So, we have listed some of the commonly committed A/B testing mistakes done by marketers.

What to avoid when A/B testing?

Comparing apples to oranges

A/B email testing always bring forth a trait in your emails that your subscribers prefer more than what you currently provide them, increasing the conversion chances. The level of changes observed in the conversion varies from company to company and also on the strategies implemented. Marketers, in the starting years, tend to compare their email performance with results of peers or the ones specified in some case studies and are dejected not to reach the same level.
What these people miss out is the fact that the conversion rate achieved by someone is different as everyone has a different marketing style. Also, the conversation you have with your subscribers and on your email design impacts the conversion rate.

Not having a baseline to compare

The purpose of conducting an A/B test is to compare the results of any innovation you include in your email campaigns with the baseline set from past campaigns. If you don’t have a comparison baseline, you are more prone to put all the efforts down the drain. Additionally, by not setting a baseline for comparison, you are more prone to committing the mistake mentioned above.

Sample size can be arbitrary

One of the rookie mistakes marketers tend to commit is not having a large enough sample size to fully understand the effects of your A/B testing efforts. The more significant is the sample size, more is the accuracy in finding any changes in the behavior of your subscribers. The sample size can be calculated based on 3 factors:

Expected conversion rate
Minimum detectable change in conversion rate
How statistically significant should your results be

Sites like Optimizely, Kissmetrics have online tools you can use to calculate an approximate sample size for your A/B email testing.

Running too many A/B test at once

Imagine your email to be a big wall of ever-changing blobs of color. You are tasked to find the pattern in which the colors are changing. If you try to watch the wall as a whole, you may be confused by the amount to focus. On the other hand, if you focus on one specific section of the wall, you are more easily able to track the color change pattern.
Similarly, whenever you conduct A/B testing of your emails, it is mandatory to focus on one single element. Otherwise, you may not be able to place a finger on which element change brought forth the improvement.

Changing parameters in mid-testing

While creating a theory to back your A/B testing purposes, it is vital to have a goal about what you wish to aim from it. Some marketers tend to deviate from this goal when they don’t notice any progress mid-test. Never do so. Whenever you conduct an A/B email testing, it is essential to remember that the results take time to stabilize. If you change your goal or the parameters for measuring the goal mid-test, you need to conduct the test again from the start to get the correct results.

Not testing automated emails

For most automated emails, marketers assume that you can forget about them once you have set-up the email automation workflow. As times change, the email that you set a year ago may need tweaking to continue being productive. By not conducting A/B testing on your automation email, you are avoiding a vast chunk of emails that your subscribers tend to interact with.

Denying the result you get, for the result you expect

Similar to what we talked earlier about comparing results with others, email marketers tend to aim higher and get disappointed on missing the target. While it is good to have high expectations, but it needs to be realistic. For example, if your current open rates are 22%, you cannot expect it to rise to 40% on A/B testing alone. If you have created a baseline of your existing email campaign performance, you may avoid this mistake from happening.

Following the herd

You should A/B test your emails, not because everyone does it. You should do it because you believe your emails have a scope for improvement. By following the herd, you fail to understand the purpose and end up with disappointment.

Making drastic changes to your emails

Unless you are testing the email layout, your subscribers shouldn’t notice any significant difference in your emails as it is unexpected for them. It brings forth confusion and suspicion of spam and phishing emails. The elements you test in your emails need to be subtle enough to avoid getting adverse reactions from your subscribers.

A/B testing ideas to test in your next email campaign

Long v/s Short Subject Lines

The subject line is the first interaction your subscriber has with your email. It needs to be engaging enough to motivate the subscriber to open the email. Having a longer subject line has its own challenges as it gets clipped at different lengths for different email clients. The character count for a subject line should be ~35, yet your subscriber may be ready to read subject lines more extended than that. Experiment by A/B testing between two different subject line length

High emotional value Subject lines vs. low

The message in your email subject line is essential, but more important is how to communicate it. The emotions you convey in your subject line impact the conversion significantly. The emotional value of your subject line can be divided into 3 types:

Intellectual: Words that trigger a sense of reasoning and evaluation
Empathetic: Words that trigger a positive emotional reaction to the problem faced
Spiritual: Words that trigger the deep emotional level of a subscriber

Emoji in your subject line

In the modern world of having expressions for all kinds of situations, emojis are enhancing the conversations we have. Even then, emojis cannot be used at every opportunity, and your subscribers’ reception to emoji can be analyzed using A/B testing it for a small sample. The reason can vary from email client support, brand personality, level of comfort, type of business model (B2B or B2C), as well as personal preferences.

Experiment with email copy approach

The tone of your email copy matters a lot in engaging your customers. If you observe decent open rates, but your click rates are comparatively low, then you need to rework the approach of your email copy. There are multiple ways to include persuasion and influence that draws your subscribers to read further. Some of the most common approaches when it comes to email marketing are:

Before-Bridge-After: This email copy style shows the problem that your customer relates with. You follow-up with the solution that you used and finally end with the current situation which the subscriber aims to reach.

Pain-Agitation-Solution: This type of email copy style is a direct approach of the pain points of your customer and agitate the pain by stating the thought of your customer in your words and then provide your solution that would eliminate the pain point.

AIDA Method: This is a prevalent marketing strategy where you draw Attention to the issue at hand, express your Interest in helping them, build their Desire of not missing out and make them take Action on completing reading your email.

Best Practices

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when running an email A/B test:

Keep your sample as large as possible for an accurate result
Your gut may wish to go in a direction that is contradictory to what the collected data. Avoid it.
Test your email campaign frequently for uniform result free from novelty
Always test one email element at a time

Best Calls-to-action (CTA) Ideas/Example In Email That isn’t “Click Here”

Words have a huge impact on people. Some poetry can move us emotionally, a word of criticism can hurt us on many levels, while correctly framed statements can be the source of motivation. In fact, the power of email marketing depends heavily on how well you are able to convey the message in your emails. Additionally, the effectiveness of your email copy is tested based on how many subscribers are motivated enough to click the call to action.

Yet one of the novice mistakes that most email subscribers do, is sticking to the cliche CTA copy such as “Know More”, “Learn More”, “Click Here” or the most dreadful “Submit”. Similar to your subject lines, your CTA copy should also hint on what the subscriber can expect when they click on the button while being actionable. Thankfully, brands are moving away to explore CTA copies that aren’t ‘Click here’ or ‘Submit’ and this article shall showcase some of the email examples from brands that have unique CTA copies & explain the best practices while creating CTA.

“Learn about CTA”… not “Learn More”

Imagine you are invited to visit an upcoming restaurant in your neighborhood. The only information specified on the invitation is the name of the restaurant, the address, and ‘Visit Us’ at the ending; would you dare to visit? What if instead “Visit to Try the Best Sushi” was what was inviting you? The chances are, now that you are aware of what to expect, your decision becomes more clear.
Emails are like the above-mentioned event invitation, too less space to specify each and every detail without your subscribers losing interest mid-way. So you need to redirect them to a landing page that carries additional data by making them click the CTA button. Yet if you don’t communicate what the subscriber can expect at the landing page, paranoia will stop them from clicking. So, instead of using generic terms that seem actionable, use actual actionable terms that explain what to expect while staying actionable. To understand better let’s see some examples. The examples shown below are taken from ReallyGoodEmails, check them out for an exhaustive collection of emails for inspiration.

Slack

In the example above by Slack, the email talks about the different functionality users can take advantage of while using the app. The email copy starts with a general introduction about Slack tips followed by call-to-action that invites the subscriber to ‘Explore Slack Tips’. What is more interesting about this email is that the section between the two CTA buttons is a series of hyperlinks that redirect you to respective webpages making them inconspicuous call-to-actions. The email ends with another call-to-action button that drives the subscribers to ‘View’ all the tips.

Readdle

Productivity app development company Readdle, has a straightforward call-to-action in the first fold of the email. By looking on the image on the right, the subscriber gets an idea of what workbook they can download as specified by the CTA.

Frontier Flights

This reminder email by the Frontier Flights makes use of custom CTA for every individual task and stands on the point we are making in this blog. Based on the facilities provided by Frontier as well as those chosen by the user, the email has certain checkboxes unticked and the corresponding CTA shows what needs to be done. Quite well-designed email.

eMeals

In this New year’s email by eMeals, has the discount offer as the CTA copy. Why say ‘Click here’ when you can easily remind the subscriber they are getting 30% discount. Also what we liked was that the CTA is repeated.

Revelator

This new year throwback email by Revelator, is also a great example where they highlighted on major events that happened in the year 2018 and ended with a relevant CTA that says “Follow our work”. The way this email is designed, the subscriber would be intrigued to read further and the call-to-action matches the expression, greatly increasing the click-rates.

Call-to-action best practices

Actionable yet self-explanatory text: As we stated in the entire article, the call-to-action should be such that your subscriber feels like taking the action in a way that they are informed what they can expect on clicking. But take care that it is short, concise and not…
…not a sentence: Word length also matters. Instead of having a CTA copy “Try XYZ – Free for 60 days” you can make it concise as “XYZ for 60 days Trial”
Placement matters: CTA placement is a crucial discussion that has been going on for ages. Many argue that by placing in the first fold, those clicking are taking a blind shot, while many contradict it by stating CTA placed at the end would go unnoticed. We believe that depending on the action to be taken, the CTA should be within the second scroll as any longer format email would be skimmed.
Use a contrasting color: The goal of the CTA is to be clicked. But if the end user is not able to differentiate between the email copy and the call-to-action, then the efforts go to waste. So always have your primary call-to-action in the form of a button and have a contrasting color background for easy recognition.
‘My’ converts better than ‘Your’: Having a first-person CTA copy has proven to be more effective. Michael Aagard of Content Verve observed 90% increase in clicks when the CTA copy is written in first person view. The reason behind is that people are psychologically more moved when they realize that clicking the button shall benefit themselves.
Sense of urgency: You want your subscribers to click the link and if you manage to create a sense of urgency in your subscribers, it translates into improved click rates. The same sense of urgency can be seen in the example above from eMeals.
A/B test your copy: Even though your subscribers have remained subscribed to your brand doesn’t mean that you have figured them out. Experiment with the color, style, text, font to understand what works for your subscribers.
Add a sub-text: A pre-header text is to explain further what you missed to communicate in your subject line. Similarly, you can add a sub-text to your call-to-action in order to explain anything that was left out. While this is prevalent mostly in websites, some of the brands are transitioning it onto the emails as well.

Wrapping Up

You may have the amazing looking email design, filled with interactivity, but if your subscribers fail to click on the CTA button, your efforts behind the email have been lost. While the error may be as insignificant as asking your subscribers to ‘Click here’ but your subscribers may not ‘click’ out of paranoia. We hope this article managed to give you inspiration and helped you improve your email marketing game. We constantly update the examples for you to remain updated, so bookmark this link.

Why Email List Verification/Hygiene Is Important?

Sending an email campaign to your subscribers is similar to talking to them from a podium. The larger are the number of attendees, the larger are the chances of your message to reach more people. Yet, whom you are addressing also matters for the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Talk about the benefits of electric vehicles to an audience gathered to learn more about a nutritional diet won’t gain you any customers. Instead, you may end up losing credibility and being blacklisted (in case of emails, unsubscribe and marked SPAM). Similar to how conferences are arranged for a relevant community, email list should be occasionally weeded for the relevant audience.

This article shall focus on what email list verification is, how it affects email list hygiene, what kinds of emails address should be removed from your mailing lists, & different ways to keep your email list ‘spick and span’.

Email List verification and Importance

Similar to the physical world, an email address points towards a specific inbox that is located in a domain name. In a situation where an incorrect email address is provided, the email is not going to land in the intended inbox and the message is, therefore lost. Additionally, some email addresses in your mailing list may have explicitly declined to be emailed and sending them emails may bring forth their ire.

Email list verification is a method to verify the email address given by a subscriber during the signing-up process is connected to a genuine inbox. Email list verification is like the filter that stops emails to be sent to inboxes where the email should not be sent by weeding them out initially.

How is email list hygiene affected

As soon as the marketing potential was identified in emails, the scope for misuse was needed to be avoided and that lead to the creation of anti-spam laws. Every email address was associated with a dedicated IP address and in order to send emails to bulk recipients, you need to maintain a sender reputation. Any misuse affects the sender reputation and a low sender reputation = ISP ensuring your emails are not delivered to your mailing list.

Sending or, the appropriate term, bombing your subscribers with irrelevant emails would turn them off and they may not prefer to hear from you anymore. In the real world, if you keep on knocking on an abandoned house multiple times, it surely will draw the attention of the police. Similarly, if you keep on sending emails to an abandoned email address, it will draw the attention of the ISP filter suspecting foul email marketing practices and result in lowering sender reputation.

Most ESP (Email Service Provider) charges you for the number of subscribers in your mailing list. So, every email that you send costs you money, so you need to send them to only those who value the information provided in them. So an email sent to an email list with bad hygiene would incur you unnecessary charges.

So in a nutshell, not implementing proper email verification practices results in bad email list hygiene. A bad email list hygiene results in:

High bounce rate: Since some of the email addresses might be dormant, mistyped or non-existent, any emails you send to them are going to ‘bounce’ away
High Spam complaints: SPAM is when someone receives an unsolicited email or email that they never subscribed to. So if you do not verify email addresses, you may end up sending emails to those who had already unsubscribed. A Spam complaint then sets the suspicion that the mailing list was a purchased and not built/generated.
Blacklist: For an email sender that has a lot of SPAM complaints are automatically marked as a fraudulent sender and this diminishes your credibility. A blacklisted sender is no longer allowed to send any emails and any emails that may be sent in the future would be filtered as SPAM complaints. Additionally, the ESP would disable your account as soon as it suspects you of spamming.
Heavy Fines: As per GDPR and other anti-SPAM laws, if you are caught practicing wrong methods of email marketing, you can be levied heavy fines as high as 4% of your brands yearly revenue.

Types of email addresses you don’t need

Whenever you send an email to a set of email addresses in your mailing list, it is most ISP at the email recipient end verify them against 3 main SPAM traps namely:
Pristine: A list of email addresses that are not opted into receiving any email. Receiving an email on such address is an indication that the sender has purchased the mailing list.
Typo: These are a set of email addresses with misspelled domain name matching any of the well-known email domains such as Gmail, Yahoo, Apple, etc. These email addresses will return hard bounce notification and a drop in your sender reputation.
Recycled: These are a set of email addresses that have been dormant for a long period or abandoned by their users and have been repurposed by the ISP to monitor spamming.
So in order to avoid getting stuck on the above-mentioned SPAM traps, verify &eliminate the following 3 types of email addresses from your mailing list.

Email addresses dormant for more than 6 months: Mostly common with B2B email addresses where the email owner may no longer be working with the organization and so the email address becomes dormant. If you find no activity from such email addresses for past 6 months, its time to bid them good-bye after an attempt to re-engage.
Mistyped email addresses: ‘[email protected]’ may look correct in a glance but has a typo. Manually scourging or removing them after a hard bounce is the only way to identify such email addresses.
Role-based emails: Email addresses such as ‘[email protected]’ or ‘[email protected]’ are created for certain roles and so there may exist a chance that you are not talking to a particular person per se. Avoid sending emails to such email addresses.

How to clean your email list

Check your sources: The best leads are those that are collected by your efforts, yet sometimes you need to outsource the work to agencies for better execution. This doesn’t mean that you need to trust them blindly, periodically check the lead quality to avoid pitfalls.
Validate email address at sign up: In order to avoid typos and invalid email addresses being added to your database, eliminate them at the beginning itself. By running email validation as soon as the visitor enters their details, you can prompt them for any human errors.
Implement double opt-ins: Even if an email address manages to pass the email validation, it doesn’t mean it is a valid one. By asking your subscriber to provide explicit permission for being sent marketing emails by clicking a link in your welcome email, you not only eliminate any dormancy, but you are also steered clear of any GDPR related issues. 2 birds with one stone.
Re-engagement your dormant one last time: The interest level will deteriorate with time and if you find subscribers that have not opened an email in the past six months, re-engage them. Send them an email that states that they are dormant but can continue to receive emails if they click a link. If that email is also ignored, it is time to bid farewell. It was not meant to be. While this may sound heartless, it is for your best interest.
Allocate one resource for list scrubbing: Have someone explicitly verify the entries to your mailing list periodically. While this may sound time-consuming, in the long run it is the best practices and provides accountability.
3rd Party tools for email list cleaning: Use different tools like BriteVerify, DataValidation, eHygienics, FreshAddress, Impressionwise, LeadSpend, StrikeIron, etc. to scrub out unnecessary email entries. These list hygiene services to ensure a good boost to the email deliverability rate.

Wrapping Up

In the case of email marketing, quality dominates quantity always and so it is better to have a small yet clean mailing list instead of a mailing list infested with thousands of fraud and non-existent email address. Also, periodic email verification can help you maintain the quality throughout your email marketing campaigns.

Tips to Create Great Onboarding Welcome Emails

The foundation of a successful business is the repeated orders, as customers making repeated orders generate 40% of a store’s revenue. In order to stimulate your customers to buy from you again, it is important for them to trust you to provide a good user experience every time. This trust-building begins right from the beginning of your relationship with them when they subscribe to your emails. Being felt welcomed to your brand family goes a long way into having lasting relationships; an onboarding email series or even a welcome email is a great way to engage with new subscribers.

This article will reflect on the anatomy of a welcome email, different types of emails you send during the onboarding stage, and how to plan your onboarding email series.

Importance of onboarding welcome emails

Comparing your online business to a brick and mortar store, receiving a welcome email is like getting greeted by the staff as you are entering. The humane interaction you feel is the emotion conveyed by an actual human and this makes you inclined to be a part of the experience. On the contrary, imagine a scenario where the staff doesn’t acknowledge your visit & is plainly showing you the products in stock. You would either mechanically complete your purchase or even exit without even checking out what they have to offer.

Going with the inbound methodology, when someone subscribes to your emails, they are most interested in knowing about your brand and shows maximum engagement. In fact, 74.4% of consumers expect to receive a welcome email when they subscribe (Source: BlueHornet). If you grab the chance of greeting them and starting a conversation to onboard them, you manage to maintain the engagement and set a positive impression.

Owing to the expectation, welcome emails also result in 4x more open rates (~50%) and 5x more clicks (~14%) than other marketing emails. Going a step ahead, if your welcome email has a welcome offer, you stand a chance to boost revenue by 30% per email compared to a welcome email without an offer. (Source: InvespCRO)

Unless you are a well-known brand, there exists a chance that the visitors on your website may not be totally aware of who you are and when they subscribe, they are curious to know more. The onboarding welcome emails can be the foot-in-the-door that manage to:

Welcome and thank the new subscribers for subscribing
Introduce the brand and its products
Set an expectation about what to expect from your emails
Incentivize the sign-up process with a discount offer or freebie
Increase social followers
build a sense of customer loyalty towards your brand

Anatomy of a welcome email

As the goal of a welcome email is to ‘welcome’ or ‘onboard’ your subscribers, every element in your email needs to pass on the effect onto the email recipient i.e. your subscriber. A general onboarding email(s) can be divided into two broad categories:

Introduction: You introduce your brand with From name, subject line, and email copy
Action to be taken: Once introduced, this section is the action to be taken to begin interaction or engagement.

So let’s identify the different elements in a welcome email and how to optimize it effectively.

Introduction section

Recognizable Sender Name: Imagine you are expecting a delivery of Pad-Thai noodles from your favorite Asian restaurant and receive a pizza box. Would you open it?
Similarly, when your subscribers receive an email from you, they expect to see a recognizable name in order to open it. A familiar sender name helps the subscriber quickly relate the email with the recent signing-up act and they are going to take the next step i.e. reading the subject line.
Subject Line & Preheader text: Subject line is the first line of interaction with the subscriber that hints about what to expect inside. Most email clients such as Gmail, iOS mail, Outlook can display 90 chars of your subject line so you need to make it the hook that prompts the subscriber to open the email to read further.
Both the emails in the example below highlight the purpose of the email. The Headspace email straightforwardly suggests what the subscriber shall expect inside with their short yet crisp subject line. With the help of the preview text, you can give a sneak peek of the first line in the email. This can act as the continuation of your subject line.

Once the subscriber has opened the welcome email, the following elements need to be there. For reference, we shall use the welcome email from Headspace to explain the different elements in an email template.
A welcoming hero image and Headline: As per the popular adage, ‘First Impressions make Lasting impressions”, having a bold headline greet your subscribers as soon as they open the email makes a good impression. In the above email, you have a hard-to-miss banner image in the first fold of the email that welcomes the subscriber. The hero image complements the headline and together both make the subscriber feel welcomed.
A reminder of why they signed up: Them subscribing to your mailing list is a first step towards becoming a customer. This is a big step for your brand and shows it in your email copy as well. Show your gratitude and thank them for signing up and if you have multiple sign-ups for different goals, remind them why they signed up. In the example above, the subscribers are appreciated for signing up and reminded how this step shall lead them to a happier and healthier life.
Set expectations: Most email marketers tend to forget the fact that sending an email to their subscribers is more of a privilege and not an obligation. By not sending emails when your subscribers are most active or by bombarding them with emails at unexpected times will lead to losing out on the subscribers’ engagement. If you mostly going to send newsletter emails, inform your subscribers about when they can expect them just like demonstrated in the email below by Phrasee.

Action to be taken

Reward them: Every one of your subscribers subscribed in exchange for value addition of some sort. It can be a free downloadable, discount coupon or even knowledge. Fulfill the expectation and reward them with a download link (in case of downloadable) or a schedule of when they shall receive your newsletters. In the example below, the subscriber is notified about the benefits they receive in the trial period.
Actionable CTA or helpful resources: An email is a bridge between two landing pages and owing to restrictions in the amount of content you can include in an email, you may not convey everything in an email. By redirecting your subscribers to a relevant landing page or links, you continue the engagement without reducing fatigue. In the example for Headspace, the CTA redirects the user to their app. In the example below by Amazon, the email acknowledges that the user has registered and suggests helpful tips for them to get started.
Complete your profile: With the earlier section, you have introduced your brand to your subscriber. Now it is time for you to know them better, in order to provide them a good user experience. At the time of subscribing, the only details you have are the Subscriber name and email address. By inviting them to fill out their online profile, you create an improved database with multiple fields that you can use to personalize your emails better and create a stronger relationship with your subscribers. In this email below by Alamo Drafthouse Cinema has a link for the subscriber to enroll for their rewards program by completing their profile.
Request to whitelist: Your chances of reaching your subscribers’ inbox depends on your sender reputation. When you are suspected to break the rules of email sent to spam, ISPs tend to blacklist your email address. This reduces your sender reputation. By requesting your subscribers to whitelist your sender address, you increase the credibility and that increases your reputation. What best time to ask them to do so except when you have the first interaction with them i.e. in your welcome email.
Increase Social media followers: You have got them to subscribe to your email newsletter but why stop there? Email and Social media have their own individual forte so by adding links to your social media profiles in your emails, you encourage your subscribers to follow your updates on social media.

Types of emails to send during Onboarding Stage

While during the onboarding stage, emails can achieve multiple tasks as stated above but whether you wish to achieve it all in a single email or an email series depends on your content. Ideally, it is advisable to spread your onboarding efforts across an email series. Let see how to spread the above-mentioned elements of an email into an email series.

Email# 1 The Welcome Email: Goal of this is simply welcome the people to your brand and offer your incentive. Here you set the tone of your business.

Email# 2 Pain Point Email: Here you address a specific pain point that motivated your subscriber to subscribe. You can suggest a tool or strategy and direct the focus of the benefits that you are providing. Links to resources or blog posts can be helpful here.

Email# 3 Social Proof Email: Show how others have been benefited from your brand. Include links to case studies and feature a snippet from it to set the ball rolling.

Email# 4 Doubt clearing Email: This email can feature FAQs that are identified from the blog comments, feedbacks, customer services chats to smush any doubts raising in your subscribers’ mind.

Email# 5 Offer an unexpected freebie: Your subscriber subscribed for an incentive but providing them another freebie makes them feel exclusive. A whitepaper or even a checklist can be similar to striking gold.

Email# 6 The sales pitch: Your business thrives on sales. Give a slight nudge with an email with a limited time offer to try and make your subscribers make a purchase. A countdown timer to trigger the ‘fight or flight’ emotions.

How to plan

Step 1: Map your customer journey

Place yourself in your customers’ shoes. What would you like to learn about from the brand you just subscribed to? What would motivate you to take action?
Based on the answer you get, the criteria for progressing between the stages in a customer journey becomes clear. This helps you decided between sending a single welcome email or an email series. Additionally, it also helps you decide the order of the emails be sent.

Step 2: Create separate paths for each segment

By setting up the customer journey, you create multiple paths based on customer preferences and choices, which eventually converge at the same end. The criteria for initial segmentation can be the source of subscription. Did they subscribe for the newsletter? Did they register for a free trial? Were they referred by an existing customer?
Based on the source, you create different paths that may coincide at certain points based on segmentation criteria.

Step 3: Create contextual content

Once the paths are defined it is time to provide information that is in context with their reason for subscribing. Newsletter subscribers are thanked and notified about the email schedule. Those subscribers who opted for a discount code are welcomed with the code along with a section featuring top products. Trial-opters get an email that instructs them about how to get started and the features they receive on paid accounts. Referral bonus subscribers receive a welcome email that focusses on introducing the brand.

Wrapping Up

As per the famous proverb “For Want of a Nail”, a small act that seems unimportant at the moment can have a great impact in the long run. Similar, the impression set during the onboarding stage has an influence on the relationships you build with your subscribers. Need help with creating a great onboarding email? Get in touch with us and we can be of your service.

Switching Email Service Provider? Keep Following Things In Mind

Email marketing is a key channel for leveraging prospects’ interest and converting them into consumers. Email Service providers (ESPs) help brands to procure and sustain the bond with their subscribers. Targeted and personalized email marketing goes a long way and this is the reason why emails generate the most ROI out of all the marketing channels.

(Graphical presentation from Campaign Monitor’s 2018 industry marketing annual report)

What is an ESP or Email Service Provider?

In simple terms, an ESP is a company that provides email hosting services to the organizations that facilitates email marketing campaigns for them.

For e.g. – Welcome emails, order history & payment confirmation emails, and discount offers or sale emails.

These email hosting services differ from provider to provider, thus every ESP might or might not have different things to offer to their customers. While there are industry giants like MailChimp, other ESPs too have many things to offer. For many reasons, an organization will take up a decision to switch the ESP. This decision is a tricky one and needs some serious prep work before shifting. Fret not, we’ve compiled a list of important things you should keep in mind before making the move. Check out…

1) Sender Reputation

Switching ESP also means moving to a new IP address and domain. If Email Service Providers don’t know you or, more specifically, don’t know your IP address and domain, the risk of being filtered as junk mails increases. Make sure to rebuild your reputation. Most Email Service Providers help you with warming up strategy. This means as a rule of thumb, for the first couple of weeks after migrating to new ESP, break down your contact list of 50k to 4 portions and send one blast to 12.5k per day for 4 days. Repeat this process for the first 2 to 3 weeks. This is to ensure that you don’t trigger any SPAM alerts.

2) Data Migration

It is almost certain that you’ll remember transferring the important data like subscribers lists, client email addresses and other user profiles to your new ESP. But another essential and easily overlooked data is of unsubscribers, hard bounced addresses, and spam email addresses. Failing to transfer this information and updating the same could upset customers and damage your sender reputation with new ESPs.

3) HTML Tracking

As all the marketers are aware of the cookies and tracking code available on the website to learn the visitor’s pattern of buying and surfing, your websites too will have those codes applied for monitoring clicks and conversions. When switching to a new ESP, it’s imperative you consider the entire breadcrumb trail involved in your email. Don’t forget to update this HTML tracking code.

Extra Tip: Talking about HTML, an extra tip while switching your Email Service Provider will be to migrate your HTML email templates as well. This is fairly important as your customers are used to receiving a certain look and feel from your emails, so it is vital to follow the same pattern for upcoming email campaigns too.

4) Integration Update

Make certain your new ESP is compatible with your current CRM system, and address the integration of these two tools early on. The ability of these two systems to work together is vital to your marketing process.

5) Automation and Integration

Make sure to update and migrate the subscriber forms, automated campaigns, or any other forms integrated with your website. You don’t want to lose any new subscribers by not transferring any of it!

Endnote

To put this in a nutshell, the following are needful Prep Work before Switching ESP,

Have a library of current campaigns with details on audiences, subject lines, and more.
Take inventory of all the email signup, lead generation, and other forms that feed data into your ESP—whether they’re on your website, in your mobile app, on social media pages, in digital ads, or elsewhere.
List all the points of data integration between your ESP and other systems.
Ask your new ESP to send over all API documentation.
Keep a running list of migration to-dos, deadlines, and assignments.

Moreover, you don’t want to forget anything vital, like your historical data, says Caldwell. “Brands always forget data and don’t notice until a couple of months after they’ve said goodbye to their former platform,” he says. “There’s a ton of history that should be leveraged into the new platform and most reporting systems won’t allow you to import archived reports, so begin that process early. You can’t afford to lose historical trends, benchmarks, and key learnings.

[Free Templates] Mother’s Day Email Marketing Guide

Mom. Amma. Moeder. Mae. Mere. Mutter. Madre. Aai.

Different words yet the meaning boils down to a single word: Mother.

Even though every day where you mark your presence is because of your Mother, the world celebrates the second Sunday of May every year as ‘Mother’s day’. With the influx in the trend of gifting own mothers, brands and email marketers have already started with their marketing efforts for upcoming Mother’s Day.

To help you with Mother’s day email marketing, this article shall guide you on some of the email marketing tips, subject lines as well as email examples from brands that bring in the charm of Mother’s day in their emails.

Mother’s Day Specific Email subject lines

As with other festive occasions such as Easter

Give her a tote full of candles for Mother’s Day! – Yankee Candle Company
💐 🧚 Mother’s Day Flowers & Gifts – BloomThis
Don’t Forget Your Mum! 👩 – Hunting for George
This Gown Has Mom’s Name On It – Carole Hochman Designs
Here’s to our Mommas ❤ – Pinhole Press
Mother’s Day Gifting + Your Complimentary Hand Wash* – Circa Home
Mom’s the word – Ted Baker
For Mom: A Personal Gift That’ll Arrive on Time – YETI
Our Mother’s Day Handbag Box Is Packed With Our New Spring Scent 🌷 – Beekman1802
Best. Mom. Ever. (!!!) – Paper Source
🌸Need Some Mother’s Day Gift Ideas? Open This!🌸 – Eat Cake Today
We have the *perfect* Mother’s Day solution – Lovepop Cards
Celebrate Her 🌷 Introducing Our Tastemaker-Approved Mother’s Day – Mark and Graham
For all those mama birds out there – Maria Shireen
To Mom, with love: Mother’s Day Gift Guide + Price drop alert on your Elie – Saks Fifth Avenue
Just For You, Mom: 💐 (and a Flash Sale!) – Dot & Bo
Celebrate Every MOMent | Happy Mother’s Day! – The Paper Store
Still haven’t bought Mom a Mother’s Day gift? – Winc
Wait, Tomorrow is Mother’s Day? – La Colombe
Putting the Om in Mom 💐 | 25% Off Fearless After 50 Program – YogaDownload.com

Mother’s Day Email Templates

HotTopic

This Mother’s Day email by HotTopic uses an animated GIF to show the conversation between a mother and her daughter. This is followed by a feature of some of their products in a zig-zag pattern. The disclaimer in the footer could have been represented in a better way to reduce the overall email length.

American Fighter

This minimalistic email by American Fighter manages to communicate a lot with clever typography. In one glance the design does justice to both foreground email copy as well as the back. The only scope of improvement lies in the navigation menu as it is camouflaged with the white background.

DSW

This email by DSW has the human touch that makes the reader feel that this brand is actually run by humans with emotion. In addition to promotions, they have featured responses from their employees about their mothers. Additionally, by displaying their photographs, they have associated a face with the voice. They have also targetted last moment shoppers with offers on gift cards.

Pediped Footwear

No sale. No promotions. The simple wholehearted greeting is what makes this Mother’s day email by Pediped Footwear a true delight. Such kind of emails make you feel close to the brand and also increases brand visibility.

Pinhole Press

Another email where the email layout features images of real people alongside their responses. What makes this email amazing is that all images are candid images from their users and they motivate user interaction with an actionable call-to-action button at the footer.

LovePop cards

This mother’s day email by LovePop is also a brilliantly designed email. The first fold features some of their products followed by a zig-zag layout detailing each pack separately with individual call-to-action button.

Kidpik

Kidpik’s Mother’s day email is also a very minimalistic email where the animated GIF speaks volume about their email as well as their industry. What makes this email special is that the featured images are from their customers and such activities increase user engagement heavily.

Daily Harvest

This email by Daily Harvest shines thanks to the brilliant email copy. At first glance, the email resembles a plain text email that is wishing the customers. As you read further, you observe how seamlessly the conversation changes to how Daily Harvest is a part of your daily routine. The copy ends with a paragraph about their latest product that is not like anything else (generates exclusivity).

In case you are looking for some pre-made email template, check out the following two.

Download

Mother’s Day Email Marketing Tips

Keep the email design very simple: As you can see in the above examples, while the email designs carry flair but still maintain simplicity. While the central theme is mostly pink but your creativity is the limit while it comes to designing your email templates. Stick to a single core message followed by a clear call-to-action.
arget the last moment shoppers: As humorously stated in one of the subject lines above, most people forget about doing any Mother’s day shopping and you can target them with last moment offers. Add urgency in email copy or using a countdown clock.
Personalization is key: Emails are all about creating a conversation with your customers. Utilize past data to personalize your offers and products as per the customers’ preferences.
Segment your list to separate different customer category: List segmentation is not only for splitting your list based on common interest but you can also segment it on the basis of the life-time-value (LTV) of your customer. High spending and Loyal customers can be sent exclusive offers.
Re-engage your dormant customer: The customer who bought from you last year may not be active this time. Yet their email address might have made it’s home in your emailing list. Re-engage such dormant customers to draw some amount of revenue from them and bring them back into your sales cycle.

Wrapping Up

Whether you are a small business owner or an email marketer representing a brand, tapping into the emotional quotient of your customers can make them feel connected you. Sending a mother’s day greeting can be the small gesture that makes them feel so. Need a hand in creating your Mother’s Day email marketing campaign? Talk to us at [email protected].

100 Easter Email Subject Lines – Inspiration For Your Email Marketing Campaign

Are your Easter emails ready to hop in your subscribers’ inboxes? Well if not, then you better gear up for this spring fest, because when Easter is around the corner, so is the season of Sales! Here’s a list of 100 Easter email subject lines that can inspire you for creative Easter bunny email campaigns.

Keep this 100 Easter email subject lines – Infographic handy for some Hoppenin’ ideas on writing those catchy subject lines that can increase your email open rates. As per the NRF’s Easter estimation survey 2019, there’s going to be a spend of approx $18.1 billion let alone in the U.S. And, out of people who are celebrating Easter this year, 31% say that sales and promotion would trigger them to shop! It is also advisable to send Easter emails more than once to keep your Easter game strong. So here’s the infographic with subject line examples from popular brands and a few brand new subject lines for your use, enjoy!

The Straight up notions

Five Below: Last Minute Easter Deals, 3-Day Easter Hop!
Williams-Sonoma: Exclusive Collections Online Now, A First Look At Easter
Williams-Sonoma: The Sweetest Selection for Easter
The Stationery Studio: Every Bunny Loves Easter
Ink Cards: Introducing our 2016 Easter Collection
Ask Italian: Easter is just around the corner…and we have chocolate pasta!
Christopher’s: Easter Egg-stravagance, Hot Cross French Toast & Almond Cigars
JibJab: Let’s get this Easter party hoppin’
Vintage Cellars: Easter treats better than chocolate | 1 Litre Spirits – 2 for $88
Oriental Trading: 2 Days Only! FREE Shipping on Any Order + Egg-normous Savings on Easter Essentials
Earth Fare: Hoppy Easter! $7.99/lb Boneless Lamb Legs & 2/$10 Tulips + More Easter Essentials!
Lillian Vernon: We’re egg-cited for Easter! So we’re giving you a DOUBLE DEAL
Old Pueblo Traders: Best-dressed Easter looks + Spring Reign Sale (Hop to it!)
PersonalCreations.com: Hop to It, Valued Customer! Introducing Easter 2019
Argos.co.uk: Cracking Easter Event deals — MUST END MIDNIGHT!
James Villa Holidays: Easter deals that won’t be beaten
Bass Pro: Hoppy Easter from Bass Pro Shops!
Artappeel.com: Egg-cellent Easter Placemats!
White Horse Hotel: Egg-cellent Easter Placemats!
Foldies: This Easter Sale Ends Tonight!
The Celtic Manor Resort: £169 with dinner — kids stay and eat free this Easter!
Essence Magazine: Vintage photos of the most stunning Easter Sunday church hats
BetterRecipes.com: Very Last Minute Recipes To Add To Your Easter Dinner
HomeGoods: JUST IN: Furniture, Easter finds & more!
Epicurious.com: The Best Thing to Do With All Those Easter Eggs
Horchow: The Best Thing to Do With All Those Easter Eggs
Stride Rite: Peep this. The Easter Shop is here!
T.J.Maxx: 4 ways to get Easter ready!
Hallmark: Open These Mystery Eggs to find the perfect Easter Basket surprise
Open Tip: Hop into Opentip’s Hippity Hoppity Easter Treat
John Lewis: Get set for Easter; entertaining, city fashion and DIY essentials
MagicCabin: Free shipping for Easter? Hop on it
Warehousexpress: Egg-citing Deals this Easter
Criquet Shirts: Wear Pastels This Easter (Brunch Will Taste Better)
Evans Cycles: We’ve got your Easter cycling covered
Fortnum & Mason: The Easter Edit: Which Egg Are you?
Cadbury: Cadbury Easter Egg Trails
Hallmark: Funny bunnies, itty bittys and more Easter fun
Cotton On Kids: Just in time for Easter! Hop to it

The Emoji Edit

Meantime: Chocolate….for Easter 🍫🍻
Potterybarnkids.com: 🐰 Did some bunny say Easter? 25% OFF our Easter shop in stores & online — this weekend only!
Graze: Tick… tock! ⏰ £5 off
Freshdesk: Hop, hop comes the Easter bunny with today’s read! 🐰
PersonalCreations.com: Save 25%. 🐣 Look What Hatched…Easter!
Old Navy: 🐰 The Easter bunny has more up his sleeve…
Oompa: ✿ Happy Easter from Oompa Toys ✿
Hobby Lobby: 🐰 Hop to it! Easter Sale!
Crazy 8: 🐰 50% Off EVERYTHING. Thanks, Easter Bunny!
West Elm: 🐣 Happy Easter! HUGE savings just for you!
Seagull Book: Free shipping + Easter items to enrich your study! 🌷
Oliver’s Travels: Find Your Easter Getaway 🐰
Von Maur: You’ll ♥ Our Easter Home Décor!
Britannia Hotels: 🐣 Happy Easter Irina!
BBarnett: Wishing You a Wonderful Easter 💐
Pottery Barn: 💐 Happy Easter! See what’s in your basket…25% off 1 item + Free Shipping!
Want That Trend: Crack open for some bun-derful Easter treats! 🌷🐰🌼

The Percentage Game

Hotel Chocolat: Get 15% OFF this Easter with our early-bird offer!
Hotel Chocolat: Today only! Get 15% OFF for our Easter Shopping Day
Amazing-Solutions: Enjoy 25% OFF for EVERYBUNNY — Because It’s Easter!
Global Wine Cellars: 20% off Easter Inspiration
PersonalCreations.com: Hold My Peeps! Save 20% & See What’s New for Easter.
Lane Bryant: 50% off is hoppin’ away in just hours
Crafbits: 100% fat free Easter

Eggs, Bunnies and More

Topman: How’d you like your eggs?
Curries Online: Sick of chocolate? Grab a curry.
EB Games: EGG-Stra special deals! One day only
Chadwicks: Any bunny want to save $20?
Banana Republic: Egg Hunt! Find the Eggs Hidden Around our Site for Extra Savings
AMS: Enter to Win 2 Dozen Chocolate Covered Strawberries
West Elm: Hop to It!
Henry & David: Ears to You!
Things Remembered: Oh, Hoppy Day!
STRADA: < NOTICE: It’s a long weekend >
Crate & Barrel: Everybunny’s here!
Hershey’s: Your pet could be the next Cadbury Bunny!

Ready to use, fresh Subject lines

🐰🐰🐰 Load Up Those Easter Baskets….
🐰 The Easter bunny has one more surprise…
Funny-bunny 🐰 Easter tryouts! An Eggsclusive edit!
Reveal Your Deal 🐣 Easter Offer Inside
🐰 Every Bunny Ready for Easter?
Hippity hoppity treat your favorite-y ♥
🐰 Make Way For Bunderful Easter Surprises! 🐰
Spegg-tecular Easter offers are on ✿! Sale lasts only for 3 days.
Here’s what’s cracking 🐣
Celebrate Easter with extra savings!
Don’t Miss Your Easter Weekend Treat – 40% Off All Full Price
Easter Spectacular With Up To 70% Off
Every Bunny Loves Easter – Schedule your Easter Gift Delivery Today!
Get HOPPY! Your ONE-STOP Shop For All Things Easter.
You won’t find these goodies in an Easter egg.
Don’t Let This Easter Egg Go Bad!
Crack open your Easter treat!
We’ve got eggs-celent deals – just for you!
Big sales event – Hop to it!
Go down the savings rabbit hole
Ears to you – an exclusive coupon just for you!
Easter’s early: Are you ready?
Is your basket ready? Easter arrivals are here.
Don’t miss out our eggciting Easter deals! + Passover picks!
The eggceptional Easter Edit!

Need some more inspiration? Check out these 100 Killer Holiday Email Marketing Subject Lines.

Have a Happy Hoppy Easter!

Stay inspired with latest email marketing trends and email template design inspirations with QeInbox! For now, let this Easter email subject lines guide help you up your Easter marketing game.

AMP for Emails – Gmail Is Changing The Future of Email Interactions

AMP for email – A striking new update on how we engage through emails! On 26th March 2019, AMP Project announced major email clients are beginning to roll out support for AMP. The news is all over and all set to change the future of email interactions. Here is an article that’ll help you uncover what actually lies beneath this ‘AMP for Email’ or ‘AMPHTML’ update, and how it is going to affect you.

What is AMP for email?

AMP for email is another way for marketers to leverage the speed of the accelerated mobile pages framework. In the official release on the AMP blog, Product Manager of Gmail and Chat, Aakash Sahney, calls it a powerful way for developers to create more engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.

Dynamic content

Thus far, email content has been primarily static. The user cannot engage with it other than to read, watch, or click through. With AMP for emails, dynamic content allows for more versatile engagement, like form submission, for example. Here are some of the dynamic content elements you’ll be able to use with AMP for email:

amp-form: This is AMP’s form element. It allows designers to create forms directly in an email that can be completed by users.
amp-selector: This is a multi-select widget for use within a form.
amp-bind and amp-state: Simple scripting language in AMP that allows the manipulation of a state machine for interactions between elements. Can also be used to add behavior on certain events. amp-state is used to remotely fetch the initial state machine values.
amp-list: Remotely fetches JSON data that will be rendered by an.
template type=”amp-mustache”: A Mustache template markup to render the results of an amp-list call.

Layout

The layout of the traditional email is fairly rigid. AMP for email opens it up with elements like a carousel for media, lightboxes for images and text, and accordions for showing and hiding different sections. Here are the elements you can use to display your email in novel ways:

amp-accordion: A UI element that facilitates showing/hiding different sections.
amp-carousel: A carousel UI component.
amp-sidebar: A sidebar for navigational purposes.
amp-image-lightbox: A lightbox for containing images.
amp-lightbox: A lightbox for containing content.
amp-fit-text: A helper component for fitting text within a certain area.
amp-timeago: Provides a convenient way of rendering timestamps.

Media

In the battle against bounce rate, media is your greatest enemy, contributing more to load times than any other element. With the two elements below, you’ll ensure efficiency and speed without compromising design.

amp-img: An AMP component that replaces “image”.
amp-anim: Embeds GIF files.

Example of AMP for email

AMP hasn’t been fully rolled out to all users yet. That doesn’t mean we don’t have examples of its usage though. In 2018, a few businesses partnered with Google to highlight what marketers can do with AMP for email. At the 2018 AMP Conference, they showcased the results.

Doodle

Doodle is a tool that makes scheduling meetings easier. With the help of polls on locations and times, managers can figure out optimal gathering times for all participants.

Normally, these polls require visitors to complete more dynamic actions on a web page. But, with AMP for email, things look a little different.

The above image is of a meeting invitation. This provides various options by the invitee for selecting a date, day, and time of the meeting. Earlier, when we want to accept the invite, we would be directed to a separate webpage and then select the dates, but with AMP for Emails feature, it is easy to accept such meeting invites and select preferred options without leaving the Gmail itself.

Possible negatives to AMP for email

While AMP for email brings revolutionary potential to a powerful medium, not everyone’s convinced it’ll be for the better. In a blog post for Litmus, Jain Mistry outlines a few problems the technology may face:

There’s little support from ESPs: Emails using AMP aren’t like traditional emails, so, they can’t be built the traditional way. If your email service provider can’t support the technology needed to create them, you may find yourself unable to.
AMP for email only works in Gmail: Currently, AMP for email is exclusive to Gmail. If your email list is primarily Gmail users, this may not be an issue. If it isn’t, you may have to create a non-AMP version of your email for non-Gmail users.
Tracking may be limited: Tracking is crucial to optimization. Currently, marketers can track opens, clicks, etc. to improve campaigns. When you add to the list of actions users can take, you also add to what marketers must to track. Will there be ways to track them?
It may confuse users: The problem with completely changing the way we use email is that it could potentially be too much too soon.

For example Dynamic content; while giving marketers the opportunity to keep their emails up-to-date after sending, could confuse users expecting static content. Mistry writes: “Imagine opening the same email once, twice, and then a third time expecting to find the same content and not? It’s a tactic that may lead to losing trust among your subscribers — a valuable commodity in email marketing.”

Note – This post was originally featured on the Instapage blog. It is reposted here with some edits.

If you want to design certain kind of email templates (take a look at few of our email template examples here) and or want to check for the deliverability of your emails, get in touch with QeInbox’s experts. We’ll guide you and lead you towards a better email marketing scenario.

Email List Building Ideas: 15 Lead Generation Ideas for Every Email Marketer

Planning your email campaign without having a valid email list is synonymous to driving a sports car at top speed on off-terrain; you will crash and burn before you can reach anywhere. An email list not only instructs the Email Service Provider (ESP) whom to send your emails but also helps you segment your subscribers into smaller lists based on the common interests and preferences.

Additionally, email list building is not a one-off activity as list churn (invalid email addresses and unsubscribes) will cut about 25-30% of the average email list every year (Source: GetResponse). So finding new list building sources as maintaining existing ones is a consistent activity as long as you wish to grow your brand.

This article will highlight on different ways on how to build an email list from scratch including offline as well as online sources that every email marketers need to know.

How to build an email list

#1 “Pop” up to show your offering:

Pop-up banners are the most common form of lead generation tactics employed by most email marketers. There are different ways to display pop-up banners on your website but the overall concept is creating visual distraction using a banner that is displayed based on certain triggers.

The most common types of pop-ups are

- Pop-up box: The pop-up box, as the name suggests, is a small box that appears in the middle of the visible portion of the website based on the trigger. It may feature an image, a small paragraph and a sign-up form depending on the ‘pitch’ or goal of the pop-up.
  In the example below by Sumo.com, the pop-up banner is displayed when the visitor tries to exit the page.

- Drop down banners: The least intrusive display banner that drops from the top or bottom of the website carrying a sentence followed a single field form (optional) with an actionable call-to-action. Being least intrusive, the chances of the visitors overlooking exist but this gives the most impressive user experience in exchange.
  HubSpot’s example of the drop-down banner is displayed when the visitor scrolls down and remains sticky. This way the banner is sure to catch the attention of the visitor during the entire duration they are on the page.

- Slide-in banners: These type of banners ‘emerge’ from either side of the screen and prominently displays without blocking the actual view of the visitor. Similar to the pop-up box, you can feature an image, a short paragraph, and sign-up form here also.
  In the example by Campaign Monitor, the banner slides-in from the right edge in order to create enough visual distraction to suggest it’s presence.

- Full page banners: The most obtrusive yet attention-grabbing version of the pop-up banner, this ‘hijacks’ the entire view of the website and continues to display unless interacted with or closed manually. Owing to the large screen space, you have to option to include more elements here but care needs to be taken to avoid clutter.
  While visiting Sportique’s website, you are greeted by a full page banner that gets you a 10% discount on your first purchase.

#2 Feature Box

Alternate to ‘popping’ the banner, having it feature in the first fold of your blog page ensures that your visitors ‘see’ it. The feature box is a new marketing tactic adopted by marketers where the banner occupies a portion of the first fold and explains what your blog is about and how your visitors will benefit once they subscribe. Additionally, you can offer one of your downloadables or a free trial of your services just like done by Social Media Examiner in the example below.

#3 Relevant Landing Pages

Marketing is all about attracting prospects by offering exactly what they are looking for. Statistics states that having a different landing page for each target audience will help you gain more leads compared to having fewer landing pages for a common audience.

When you create a landing page whose sole purpose to accomplish one action – increase sign up, those prospects landing on that page will not be distracted with anything else. This way you ensure increased sign-ups.

#4 Multiple placements of call-to-actions:

Ideally, 90% of those who read your headline will also read your Call-To-Action (CTA) (Source: Marketing Experiments). Placement of a CTA button has been the topic of discussion amongst marketers for years. One of the solutions to those conflicted about placing the CTA button in the first fold or footer of the page is to place the same CTA button at regular interval. This way, your visitors are periodically reminded about the benefits they stand to get by subscribing.

In the example below by Hotjar, the CTA is featured multiple times in the form of a sticky menu, a button in the first fold as well as before the footer begins.

Hotjar’s homepage (First Fold)

Hotjar’s homepage (Footer view)

#5 Free Downloadables

While there are no free lunches, people love it when you offer something valuable for free. Based on the inbound methodology, when someone visits your page, they expect you to provide solutions to their current situation yet not ready to make a purchase. In such times, having them subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for some downloadable is ‘Two birds with one stone’.

You get them to be a part of your email list
You offer them something that solves their current problem while building trust

In the example below by HubSpot, when someone clicks the banner to download the eBook templates, they provide their email address in exchange of them.

#6 Social Media Sign-ups

Twitter and Facebook had humble beginnings as micro-blogging sites but now roughly boast of 3.2 billion users (Twitter) & 2.3 billion users (Facebook) globally. Utilize this user base to increase your audience base. Create viral content and promote on social media and target custom audience using social ads and promote them to subscribe to continue getting such high-quality content.

In 2017, Miami Dolphins did the same to gain 25 percent of new season ticket memberships and $4 million in revenue for the team.

They created a series of videos called ‘The Life’ and built a ‘engagement custom audience’ based on those who interacted with their content. Based on the collect audience demographics, Dolphins created Facebook Lead ads inviting their audience to sign up for various events or to receive information about tickets packages.

The lead ad posted by Miami Dolphins

The sign-up form that people filled when they clicked on the ad post.

#7 Social Media Profile

Another great way to generate leads is to ask directly from your social media profile. All different social media platforms provide the option of adding your personal bio. By including a link to your blog home page or directly subscription form, you can convert most of your social followers in subscribers.

Jordie Van Rijn of EmailMonday does the same with his Twitter bio.

#8 Email Signature promotions

Similar to the aforementioned Twitter bio promotion, by including a link to your newsletter or sign-up as a part of your email signature, you can use emails as the bait to lure in more email address.

In the example below, featuring a recent content in the email signature also notifies the recipient of it. This way the visibility of the content is greatly increased and you subsequently increase your sign-ups.

Adding the link to your email signature can also help in the next idea.

#9 Forward to friend & Referral Bonus

Leverage the contact base of your existing subscribers to further build your email list. By asking your subscribers to forward your shareworthy emails with their peers and contact list, you increase the visibility of your brands. Combine this with the email signature to get these new prospects to sign-up for your email newsletter. You tend to gain more email sign-ups from such word-of-mouth promotions compared to approaching such prospects directly.

In the below example by Cook Smarts, they have included the chance for the subscriber to forward their email right in the first fold.

Additionally, you can also incentivize the act by offering special offers as a part of your referral bonus. In the below example, owners of Misty Robots were offered discounts when they referred Misty Robotics to their friends.

#10 Gated Content

As Heath Ledger says in ‘The Dark Knight’…

When you have great and helpful content, don’t give it away. With the help of heatmap tools, observe the portion of your webpage, where most of your visitors interact and place a gated sign-up form at the point. This way, those interested would sign-up and you get a quality lead who is genuinely interested in learning more.

#11 Content Syndication

Content syndication is another great way to grab new eyeballs on your existing content. By syndicating your content on a different platform, you are re-purposing your content and increasing its visibility. As a rule of content syndication, the syndication platform needs to mention that the content was first published on your platform. This way those interested can click on your link and on landing can subscribe.

#12 Webinar Sign-up

Webinars are a boon for those who are geographically challenged to attend a physical seminar. By including a sign-up form to your webinar, you are not only collecting email address of your prospects, but also getting an email list of people attending your webinar.
The following 3 are offline methods to email list building.

#13 Sweepstakes

Everyone loves to win. When you conduct a sweepstake in which you accept email addresses of your customers, most will join with hopes of winning and getting notified via email.

#14 Brick and Mortar newsletter sign-up

By offering sign-up forms at the cash register or handing them out when your customers are shopping, you are utilizing the opportunity to remain connected with them digitally.

#15 Conference sign-up or card collections

Trade shows and Conferences are a great way to network with peers and prospects. Collect business cards and ask for permission to be mailed. If they agree, Boom! – You got a subscriber.

Wrapping Up

At the end of the day,

Amazing content + correct placement of notification + actionable calls-to-action = ever-growing email list

Having great content draws in the inbound traffic and you get repeat visitors. A timely reminder about providing a valuable incentive in exchange for their email address, you turn those repeat visitors into subscribers and are able to engage with them over email newsletters.