Although somewhat overshadowed by social media in the past few years, email marketing is still a fantastic way to engage your guests and drive bookings - just as long as you’re doing it right.
The key is to ensure you’re sending out professional, welcomed and valuable content that has been thoroughly checked for embarrassing mistakes that could jeopardize your future open and subscription rates.
Ready to launch a new email campaign? Here are 6 things to check before you hit the “send” button.
1) The Subject Line
As the first thing your guests will see when your email drops into their inboxes, it’s pretty important that your subject line sparks their interest and drives them to open the email. Make sure yours is clear, compelling and concise – ideally under 50 characters long.
2) Your Dynamic Tags
Incorporating dynamic tags such as the recipients’ first name into your campaigns is a very effective way to make your emails appear more personal. However, there’s nothing more off-putting than receiving an email that reads “Hi (First Name)”, so be sure to check and double check any dynamic tags are working as they should.
3) Your Call to Action
First of all, do you have one? Whether it’s encouraging social media engagement, promoting a new blog article or driving bookings after the launch of a new offer, it’s important to have a specific goal you want to achieve with your email. Without one, you’ll have no way of knowing if your campaign was successful. Once you’ve included a CTA, you need to make sure the link and related landing page are functioning correctly.
4) Your Copy
It goes without saying that you should check thoroughly for any grammatical and spelling errors in your content before you hit send, but you also need to take a closer look at your overall choice of language. Are you addressing your audience in second person? Referring to your guests as “you” will help keep your tone natural, friendly and conversational. Have you used strong, vibrant language to drive your guests to take action? Finally, is there any way you could make your email more concise? If you can deliver your message in fewer words, without losing any of its persuasive power; all the better.
5) Who You’re Sending To
Have you used list segmentation to make sure you target the correct group of guests? If you accidentally send the email to the wrong guest group, you could potentially lose a lot of subscribers when they find themselves presented with a message that’s irrelevant to their needs.
6) Your Email Design on Different Devices
Email content appears differently on different devices and within different email providers. It’s therefore important to test yours across as many platforms as you can, or at least the most popular platforms, before you send, and be sure to include an alternative option to view the email content online just in case.
Do you have a similar checklist you run through before you send your email campaigns? Let us know in the comments below.
