5 Ways to Craft an Effective Email

When business to customer communication happens at the click of a button, creating an effective, engaging email that captures your recipient’s attention has become more difficult than ever. As your email competes against the hundreds of other emails customers receive in the inbox weekly, knowing how to catch your customers’ eye and what standards need to be adhered to will put your email miles ahead of your competition. 

If you’re sending out an email promotion, newsletter, follow-up or any other email type, here are 5 top tips you can use to craft effective emails that get opens and engagements.  

Enhanced Visuals 

Depending on your age, some of you might remember when emails used to look like this – a blocky and gray-colored beginning for email in the early days.

Since then, email has diversified and grown enormously in its complexity, offering more than just a simple one-size-fits all email template. Now in 2024, customers expect businesses to provide a visually interesting email journey, utilizing templates that match business brand guidelines, while also delivering key information straight into their inboxes. 

Here’s just a quick snapshot of the 1,300 templates/layouts offered by ClickDimensions, covering everything from newsletters to email follow-ups. 

Remember, engagement isn’t guaranteed by just your email message anymore, customers want a seamless journey that also delivers a tailor-made, brand aligned design that grabs their attention and lets them know who is sending the email through design aspects, without them even looking at the sent address. 

AI 

Did you know that nearly 90% of marketers feel that they need to begin utilizing AI to meet customer expectations and get ahead of their competitors – source 

The hot topic for the past few years has been AI, and its effect even spreads to the corners of email marketing. Don’t worry just yet, email AI isn’t here to take marketing jobs – it’s here to make marketers lives easier through generative text and data analysis which lets businesses know when the right time to send an email is to ensure high open-rates.  

Automated Follow Ups 

Here’s a quick question for all of you marketers out there, do all of your emails have automated follow-ups? Even your newsletters? 

Emails are just one piece of the puzzle that makes up a successful customer journey, nurturing customers into leads and keeping loyalty high. In this modern, interconnected, digital age customers expect every piece of marketing collateral that they engage with to be linked to a greater journey that follows them and provides information/updates when they need it.  

As a successful business the last thing you want your customers to do is connect the dots for you by re-explaining themselves to salespeople as to why they wish to engage with your business.  

Did you know that 89% of marketers use email as the primary channel for generating leads. – source

Whether a customer has clicked on a key CTA (call-to-action) on your website, raised their hand during a webinar or engaged with a newsletter, every piece of marketing collateral needs to be tracked and linked to a greater campaign which triggers when an action occurs. 

Focusing specifically on email, automated follow ups built using marketing automation is the key to ensure all of your ducks are in a row, and your marketing teams are nurturing leads properly. 

Explore the endless capabilities of ClickDimensions Marketing Automation and email by clicking here. 

Unsubscribe Options 

A more recent update to the email customer journey resides in the ability to perform a one-click unsubscribe. But what is a one-click unsubscribe?  

As explained by ValiMail a one-click unsubscribe is “a user-friendly feature embedded directly within the email interface that lets subscribers instantly opt out of mailing lists with a single click.” 

One-click unsubscribes prevents users from needing to hunt round for the unsubscribe button with secondary confirmation pages – just one click and the action is performed.  

Email marketers need to take this new rule seriously as top email providers such as Gmail and Yahoo tighten the reins on spam senders, enforcing new rules such as this one to filter out unwanted emails from customer inboxes. 

Improved Deliverability 

Imagine creating an amazing email, designed perfectly, aligned to customer expectations and ready to be sent out at the optimum time using AI analytics, just for it to then end up in your recipients Junk/Spam folder. All of that time and effort wasted. This might just happen to you and your business if your email doesn’t match email deliverability standards set by providers.  

The more tech-savvy marketer may already be aware of the changing deliverability standards (important for bulk-senders), but just in case you haven’t encountered this before, let’s break it down into simple terms.  

What is email deliverability? Email deliverability refers to an email’s ability to deliver into your contacts’ inboxes, and not get caught in spam or blocked. 

What are the three main areas in email deliverability? Sender authentication (with SPF, DKIM and DMARC), engagement and one-click unsubscribes.  

We already covered one-click unsubscribes above in point 4, but the remaining two points might all seem a bit complex for the average marketer, especially when we dive into the nitty-gritty of authentication with SPF, DKIM and DMARC.  

However, we already have a ton of content ready for you to explain email deliverability in simple terms, just check out the links below to find out more: 

• Blog: The Breakroom: Email Deliverability Explained 
• Blog: Email Deliverability Q&A 
• Webinar: Ask the Expert: Deliverability 

Crafting a compelling, engaging email that fosters loyalty and interactions includes more than just a snazzy subject line. Now email marketers and businesses need to be on top of evolving customer expectations, trends and standards just to get their foot in the door (or in the inbox). Using these 5 top tips, you can ensure your email is optimized to get opens and engagements in 2024.