Promotional Email: 5 Best Ways to Sell Anything to Anybody

Despite the emergence of social media platforms and real-time video and chat solutions, email remains as relevant as ever, especially in the world of marketing. As much as 99% of consumers check their email on a daily basis, and because people use their mobile devices all the time, mobile opens account for 46% of all email opens. Furthermore, email is probably the most effective form of marketing when it comes to ROI. However, reaching your audience and getting them to make a purchase after reading your promotional email seems like a Herculean task nowadays. Why is that?

Part of it has to do with the fact that your average user has heard it all and he or she is tired of being pitched to. Also, the stats show that a business user receives 121 emails each day, which is an insane number. Needless to say, most of those emails end up getting ignored. But how do you make sure that your promotional email gets read and that it results in a sale? Take a look at these useful tips.

1. Infuse your email with plenty of personalities

Today’s audiences are choosing brands and companies which are to provide them with a personalized experience, and email is no exception. It is no longer enough to have a good product that you can offer at an affordable price. Customers, and especially millennials, prefer brands that come off as real and genuine, even if their product isn’t the best choice. So how do you use that to come up with an effective promotional email? Well, the trick is to be yourself in those emails, meaning that you should always infuse it with some humor because it showcases your personality.

If you have an unpopular opinion, go ahead and share it. Sure, it may turn away some customers, but your email can’t be all things to all people anyways. But it might really strike a chord with the right people, which will jump at the chance to purchase one of your products. For example, Ghurka, which crafts luxury leather, infuses their shopping cart abandonment email with a personal touch, not just by addressing shoppers by their name, but also by including the name of the person emailing them, along with high-quality images.

Also, you can achieve similar results by segmenting your email list and sending emails that are more targeted. According to a study, those targeted emails are responsible for 58% of all revenue for marketers that took part in the survey. For instance, if you are running an online store that sells cameras, lenses, and other photography-related equipment, your customers are going to differ from one another, so sending a uniform blanket email is not going to be very effective, nor personalized. But, you could send them emails based on the contents of their abandoned shopping cart or items they have visited in your store.

For instance, a beginner photographer who just bought his first DSLR might not be interested in your offer on high-end telephoto lenses, but he or she will be interested in stuff like tripods, batteries, camera bags, and memory cards. So, your subject line might read something like “Discount on Our Top 10 Memory Cards for Aspiring Photographers”, while the one geared toward professionals might be something like “50% On on All of Our Macro Lenses”.

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2. Tell a story

Even before there was literacy, human beings were able to pass on knowledge to younger generations through stories. It seems like our brains are wired to remember a good story, and you can make use of that when putting together your sales emails. Regardless of what kind of service or product you have to offer to your potential customers, if you wrap your pitch in a story, you can rest assured that your conversion rate will go up. Just think about all the sports movies which have inspired generations of young people to get into sports or movies like Top Gun which were basically one big ad for the US Navy.

They worked like a charm, and your email can too. Don’t just focus on features, but rather a lifestyle that a potential buyer will be getting with one of your products. If you add storytelling to that, you will have no trouble persuading people to convert. For instance, Patagonia used its promotional emails to tell a story about its Micro Puff jacket, including its inception and all the rewards it has received.

When facts are delivered as stories, they are up 22 times as memorable for readers. For instance, if we were to go back to our photography store example, simply populating your emails with product stats and features might not yield the best result. However, if you were to wrap them up in a story, it might sound something like this:

Capturing your memories is always wonderful, but sometimes, you miss out on some of them because you were fumbling with your camera, or because you have ended up with images that are underexposed and which you can’t fix later. But what if you could? What if you had a camera that could capture RAW image files, which you could edit later and fix all of the imperfections, and which is easy to operate and carry around? If want it, you can check out our range of mirrorless cameras right here.

3. Offer value

Offering a discount is one of the most effective ways to get people to buy your products, even if they haven’t considered making a purchase in the first place. Depending on the type of business you are running, you can opt for free demos, limited-time offers, or discounts. But, there is also value in stuff that is not tangible. For example, you can use email to promote some of your amazing free content which is able to address your audience’s pain points and solve problems for them. That way, you can establish yourself as an authority in the niche, and you will become their first choice when they do decide to get their wallets.

But it’s also down to how you promote your content and how well it aligns with your subject line. For instance, if you have a blog that covers marketing and SEO, you could send out an email that promotes some of your best content and uses a subject line like “Check Out These Essential SEO Tactics to Improve Your CTR”. It might work, but it would be better if you could indicate the benefits more clearly. So, a superior version of your subject line would read more like “20 SEO Tactics to Boost Your CTR by up to 25%”.

4. Insert pop culture references

People love their movies, their TV shows, their music, and their celebrities. Just take a look at how big Game of Thrones was. It seemed like people enjoyed talking about it just as much as they enjoyed it watching it. The sheer number of memes featuring GoT or Chernobyl this year was off the charts. So why not use that in your promotional email? Infuse them with pop culture references in the shape of quotes, jokes, and memes. Not only will your emails be a lot of fun, but the recipients will be thrilled at the fact that you identify with the same stuff as them.

Research shows that out of 345 campaigns between 2013 and 2016, the best ones had more than 100 media placements, and as many as 28% of them featured pop culture references. So, when talking about the quality of your products in your emails, you could jokingly rate them as “3.6, not great, not terrible” in reference to the infamous radiation readings on the show which has been the subject of endless memes and jokes for months now.

5. Make your emails easy to read

When recipients open your email, especially on mobile, they will most likely skim through it first before deciding on whether they will read it or not, and they will do so in less than 10 seconds. If you think your email is too long, it may be! If you can save someone time by cutting emails, they will be ten times more grateful than having to read a long email (they will most likely be ignored or saved for later!). This means you should make sure that your email is easy to skim through, and that the formatting and fonts are clean and readable on any device.

Use clear images, as well as subheadings that break up your email into sections, as well as a call-to-action button at the end of every email, so that the reader is absolutely sure about what you want them to do after reading your promotional email. For instance, Canva uses just one line of text before pointing readers to a link featuring their content. It’s as effective as it is simple.

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Conclusion

As you can see, while creating an effective promotional email does require some effort and creativity, it is far from difficult. Start implementing these tips today and watch your sales figures as they start to climb. Good luck!

This article is written by Mary Voss. Mary is a freelance writer, content creator of educational, management, marketing topics, and an editor in ukbestessays. She is a permanent co-organizer, moderator of educational webinars, and participator of various creative marketing projects. Her main areas of interest are traveling and teaching people to live an abundant and limitless life.