Did you know that email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter?

Emails are a great way to educate, inspire, and keep in touch with your audience. From blog highlights, to product updates, to new videos– email play a huge role in content distribution. That’s why we’ve come up with 6 tips to improve your email marketing!

We’re not the only ones using the power of emails (clearly, everyone’s mailbox is flooded with them) which makes it even more important to have your email stand out. Checkout our tips below.

1. Keep the Subject Line Simple

We learned this lesson the hard way. While we like to be fun and cheeky in our writing style, it’s best to keep email subject lines simple. Make it clear what the email contains! Just tell it like it is.

Mailchimp analyzed more than 40 million emails sent from customers through their platform, and singled out the ones with the highest and lowest open rates. They found that the best open rates came from emails with subject lines that were simple, and described exactly what the email was about. For example, if you’re sending out a monthly newsletter with all of your latest updates…

Try this: “Flixel Newsletter | Top Cinemagraph Tricks”

Not this: “You’re TOTALLY Going to Love These Secret Cinemagraph Tricks”

See the difference? If you try to use clickbait in the subject line, you may get a higher open rate, but the actual CTR within the email will be low as the subject line is misleading and may result in a lot of readers hitting the unsubscribe button.

2. Use the Power of Video Thumbnails

People love watching videos ― they can’t get enough of them! In fact, using video in emails can lead to a 2x or 3x increase in CTR, says Hubspot.

While you may already know this, what you may not know is that using a video thumbnail in your email can help push your CTRs even further! Wistia, a video platform, did 7 separate A/B tests to see if adding a video thumbnail with a play button and timestamp would improve the overall CTR of an email. Here’s what they learned:

Video thumbnails can increase clicks by 21.5% or more!

3. Have a Clear CTA

I have one major tip for you regarding your CTA, also known as a call-to-action ― make it clear. Don’t crowd your email with paragraphs of copy, an abundance of visuals, or too many buttons/links. Give your reader a clear call-to-action. If they have too many choices, they won’t know which button to click. Or even worse, they may just scan your email without clicking anything.

Something to think about before sending out your email. Why are you sending it? What is the main goal? Once you nail those, you can identify what your main CTA should be ― such as getting the reader to click through to an inspirational blog post, a promotional discount, or a tutorial video.

4. Be Human

I actually wrote another blog called How To Attract More Customers with Ads that Don’t Suck.  One of the main points in that post was to be human. Or rather, You’re a Human, So Be Human. This applies to all aspects of marketing! Make your copy clear. Tell the viewer why they should care, and what your value is. Give them a compelling, honest reason to delve deeper into the relationship.

Cut the marketing bafflegab and use terms that relate to your customers. Flowery language may look great on paper, but it will be lost on many – or worse, it’ll completely turn them off.  Be HUMAN, dammit.

5. Mesmerize with Cinemagraphs

So, you’ve got your subject line down, your main CTA, and you’re using friendly language that doesn’t over complicate or confuse the reader… it’s time to add some *spice*. By spice, I mean something that gives your email a little something special, to capture the reader’s attention.

Our trick? Cinemagraphs, naturally. 

 

Though we preach about always using .mp4 or .mov files to display your beautiful cinemagraphs on the web, when embedding a cinemagraph into an email, always use a GIF file. Why? Because you cannot control auto-playing and auto-looping video within emails, so GIFs become the only reliable file format you can use.

Cinemagraphs by Andrew Pavlidis, Cflow, and Apricot Berlin

Pro Tip: Make sure your cinemagraph loop (the duration of the cinemagraph) is short ― anywhere between 1-3 seconds, ideally. If you’re sending your emails to large companies, keep in mind then they may block messages that are unusually large. Try and keep the total size of any email  ― including your GIF or any other images ― to 10MB or less

Cinemagraph Pro for macOS makes it easy to create a GIF version of your cinemagraph for email. Simply press export, and select the GIF option under “File Format”. You will be able to decrease the dimensions here as well to ensure the file size is under 5MB. The example above is only 300 x 300, and 695 KB, which works perfectly for emails.

6. Know Your Audience

Arguably, this really is  most important aspect to good email marketing. All of the content shared, and the language being used, should be chosen with your audience in mind. We know that much of our community is made up of photographers/videographers, and marketers. With this information, we are always looking for ways to inspire and help our community grow by providing content that is relevant to their interests.

For example, if our core audience was made up of marine zoologists, then I’d probably be writing about the latest news and research happening in marine biology, not 6 tips to improve your email marketing. It’s important to know your audience and talk to your community to find out how you can always be improving your content marketing strategy.

Follow these simple tricks and improve your overall email marketing. Let me know in the comments if you have any other suggestions for our readers!

Posts like this:

Digital Advertising Tips: How to Attract More Customers with Ads that Don’t Suck

How to Easily Create Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads Using Cinemagraphs