The Secret to Creating Effective Marketing Emails

Welcome to 2019, where it’s been 12 long years since Steve Jobs released the first iPhone back in 2007. No one knew it then, but that iPhone was going to change the world. The iPhone gave us the worldwide web in the palm of our hand—in a single column view! If you’re old enough to remember the Blackberry, do you remember trying to surf the web on it? It never went well. 

The iPhone screen became the benchmark for everything that is digital today. As iPhones, and then subsequent smart phones, began to dominate our culture, more and more web traffic was happening across mobile platforms. Around 2010, “mobile-friendly” became a buzz term in the communications world, especially in regards to email marketing. 

Why Did We Need Mobile Friendly Emails?

When email marketing began in the early 2000s, graphic designers and web developers had a field day. They were creating gorgeous email templates that were multiple columns wide, that when viewed on a desktop, looked beautiful and provided the reader with a rich and dynamic interactive experience.  Readers could scan the email as if it were a newspaper; they could pick and choose what they wanted to read and where they wanted to click, all from the big bright screen on their desktop computer.

But as technology progressed, the hardware no longer fit the software. Those gorgeous multi-column emails had to squeeze into that single column smart phone screen. Essentially, the desktop computer screen just shrunk to the size of your palm.  Then, readers would have to do the two-finger expand to zoom in—which never worked out well. 

Scrolling at The Speed of Light

As consumers shifted to single column mobile devices, more and more digital platforms followed suit in design. 2010 also saw the launch of Instagram, the king of single column scrolling. As apps and technology grew, was no stopping the new culture. The thumb swipe became a thing! 

Now all digital communication needed to be single column and really easy to read and understand or it was just a “thumb swipe” away from being gone. The amount of information that consumers were willing to consume on their smart phone plummeted. You now had only milliseconds of time to capture attention. Nothing that’s being communicated on a mobile device can be too long. Too much text cause consumers to shut down and swipe away.

Don’t Write for Emails

If your subject line was compelling enough to stop the thumb swipe through a consumer’s email in box, then you better be sure you don’t lose their limited attention span with a really long email. In fact, it’s best not to even write for an email anymore. If you’re going to write, put it on a blog on your website. Blogs can help with your search engine optimization (SEO) to help you become a source of information for your customers, which gives you expert status in your industry.

Email Marketing Is Too Easy

If you want to win at email marketing, it’s easy—almost too easy. Your emails should be excerpts of blog articles, a little text about content of pages on your web site, or invitations to learn more or book now. Don’t put details in emails, put headlines, images, and a few words of compelling introductory text, then give your reader the ability to click through to your destination.

Let your emails be a portal that readers can use to travel where they want to go. You want to entice the reader to click on a link in your email. When consumers are interested and they click, they will make the effort to stay engaged. However, if you lose them with too much text in the email, they’re gone. 

The best advices is to treat your email communication like a Facebook post or an Instagram post and include the following:

  1. Pictures.
  2. An attention-grabbing headline or subject line.
  3. Intriguing text.
  4. A call to action, where the reader can click a link to continue reading. 

Anything more than that and you’ll probably lose your audience’s attention. Pro Tip: Headlines on blogs and subject lines in emails are super important. Come up with subject lines that entice and intrigue. We can all do better than “This Month’s Newsletter” as a subject line. 

As the digital era continues to expand at a seemingly never-decreasing rate, as long as you maintain your digital marketing skills your spa will continue to thrive.


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