This guide to content marketing fundamentals is designed to help you understand the most important building blocks of any great content marketing strategy.
Email is one of the most powerful mediums for sharing content. In fact, 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content.
Why? Because email serves as a direct line of communication between you and your customers. But just because you can send an email straight to a customer’s inbox doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll read it. Because of that, you need to ensure the email marketing content you create immediately captures your reader’s interest and doesn’t let go.
Email marketing content can refer to any type of content that is included in marketing emails. The email content itself can include items like subject lines, body text, headers, photos, and videos.
To help keep your readers thoroughly invested, we’re here to offer some useful tips for creating compelling email marketing content and also highlight a few examples used by real companies.
93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content.
4 Tips to Create Compelling Email Marketing Content
To make crafting your emails a little smoother, we’ve got a few easy-to-implement email marketing content ideas you can use to give your email marketing efforts a little extra juice.
Tip #1: Send a welcome email
Think of the very first email you send to a recent subscriber like welcoming a new house guest. You should be warm, inviting, and give them a good reason to stick around awhile. That’s why your welcome email copy needs to draw your new subscribers in, so they’ll see the value in your email campaign and avoid hitting the “unsubscribe” button.
With an impressive open rate of roughly 82%, there’s a strong possibility that a healthy chunk of your subscribers will open that first email you send their way. But welcome emails aren’t just a good way to introduce yourself to everyone on your subscriber list; they’re also a great opportunity to create a grand entrance.
This is where you need to make a statement. Treat your welcome email like an audition of sorts. Give your subscribers a little preview of the kind of email marketing content they can expect if they stay locked into the email list. Once you’ve determined the pieces of relevant content you want to include in your welcome email, make sure you’re able to deliver on that type of content in subsequent emails as well.
Tip #2: Create a Consistent Schedule
Part of building a successful email marketing strategy is determining how often to send emails to subscribers. In order to create a lasting relationship with your email subscribers, you need to create a consistent schedule. That constant contact with subscribers, whether it’s on a weekly or monthly basis, becomes the cadence of when they expect to hear from you.
That said, you also need to be wary of sending emails too often, and only send them when you actually have something of value to share with your subscribers. In fact, almost 46% of email subscribers flag emails as spam if they’re sent emails too often. The very best email marketing campaigns don’t flood inboxes; they focus on keeping subscribers fully engaged with the emails they receive.
So, how often is too often when it comes to sending emails to your subscribers? Email marketing software company Keap says that a good rule-of-thumb is sending two emails a month before ramping up to a weekly cadence. If you’re producing email marketing content that gets consistent high engagement, however, that cadence can become more frequent.
Alas, engagement is still a challenge among many email marketers. In a survey conducted by Campaign Monitor, 58% of marketers said increasing engagement rates was their top goal, while 44% also pointed to increasing engagement rates as their biggest challenge. Making sure your email strategy is built for lasting engagement is the best way to keep those subscribers engaged.
Tip #3: Add a Personal Touch
Personalize all the emails you send to your subscribers. Personalization can help engage your subscribers by addressing their unique email marketing content needs (cool podcast links, informative email newsletters, etc.) and make your brand feel more familiar to them.
Even something as simple as personalizing an email subject line with a customer’s first name can yield great results. In fact, people open emails with personalized subject lines at a 50% higher rate than emails without them. To really nail down your personalization efforts, you need to create buyer personas that will help you understand who your target audience is and the type of personalization strategy you should use for your email marketing content.
Tip #4: Deliver on Your Promise
What good is having a personalized subject line and a gorgeous email design if you’re not actually delivering on the promise of your emails? Remember, email marketing isn’t YouTube. Clickbaiting might work once or twice if you’re lucky, but your subscribers will quickly start to lose faith in your emails if they’re constantly promised something that you ultimately don’t deliver.
This is where having good content comes into play. Just because you’re not writing a lengthy blog post or an eBook doesn’t mean your email marketing content can be of any lesser quality. In fact, since you generally have less room to work with in an email, you need to make sure your content is succinct throughout with clear CTAs that will drive your subscribers to take the desired action.
Pro tip: Personalization can help engage your subscribers by addressing their unique email marketing content needs (cool podcast links, informative email newsletters, etc.) and make your brand feel more familiar to them.
3 Engaging Email Marketing Content Examples
There are plenty of companies that do right by their email marketing content. Below are three examples of content that real companies used within their emails.
Asana: Sharing Timely Resources
Source: Asana Email (July 2020)
In the example above, Asana sent a timely email in response to the public’s concern about the effect the pandemic will have on the future of work. Beyond being topical, this email content shows you who the webinar speakers are, with a short bit of context.
It’s easy for companies to comment on current events, but it’s harder to actually offer helpful content resources in times of need. Reassuring customers that you’re here to help during difficult times and offering useful resources for them is always a great way to make them feel like you’re on their side and working hard for them.
Using email to reach out to customers and providing them with timely resources is also a great way to build brand affinity. Offering these types of resources shows that you have a strong understanding of the challenges your industry is facing. You’re not there just to boost your conversion rates or plug your social media channels — you genuinely want to help your subscribers. That simple gesture can go a long way in getting people excited about your brand and its emails.
Later: Showing off Brand Personality
Source: Later Email (July 2020)
Later’s email marketing content is loud and colorful, which is consistent with who they are as a brand in a very visual industry. In the above example, they used a bold and animated GIF in an email that served as eye-catching content to lead subscribers to a landing page.
The Instagram scheduling software company does a great job of showcasing their brand identity with vibrant images and videos. Just from seeing the moving banner image in their email, you get an immediate sense of Later’s extroverted nature as a brand that is letting you know they like to have fun with their content.
Every company has its own unique brand identity. Make sure that comes through. You need to give your emails a distinct feel, and showing off a little brand personality is a great way to do so. Whether your brand is fun or more serious, make sure that comes through in the overall packaging of your email marketing content.
Parse.ly: Utilizing Interactive Content
Source: Parse.ly Email (June 2020)
The example above shows one of three GIFs that Parse.ly used to specifically show how to find weekly and monthly content trends within their software. The GIFs were part of an email that featured a brief walkthrough of a new product feature they recently launched.
Parse.ly’s email marketing content in the GIF above is a great example of interactive content. In addition to GIFs, you can also add items like quizzes, polls, interactive charts, and infographics to keep your subscribers more engaged with the email.
Interactive content is also a very effective means of educating subscribers who are existing customers and potential customers. Use your email marketing content as an opportunity to educate customers on different aspects of your product or service in engaging ways. Having interactive components that help guide your customers is a great way to keep them engaged throughout the email.
Keep Your Email Marketing Content Sharp
Email marketing content is a content marketing channel that requires a deep knowledge of your subscribers’ content wants and needs. Since you generally have less room to engage your audience in an email, you need to be extra picky with the content you decide to include in your email series.
