I repeatedly said that in social email marketing you want to focus even more on the content of your emails to make them sharable. However, of course your business content should always be relevant and important, regardless the medium.
Relevant content in emails is not only important because of sharing. It’s also crucial for getting your email marketing basics right: reaching the inbox, getting your emails opened and generating good old clicks.
I assume that you know that the reading environment of email is different (preview panes and stuff), that the sender address and name are important, etc.
The attention span of web users is short. In email, it’s even shorter. People look at subject lines and sender addresses. And when they decide to open the email, they scan it, they don’t read.
If what they scan appeals to them, they start reading. And once they are reading it’s a challenge to keep them interested.
However, generally the purpose of emails is to have people clicking some link, and you don’t want to give everything away in your emails. It’s quite a tough job to find the right balance in the end: getting your emails noticed, getting them opened, getting recipients to scan them, grabbing their attention, getting them to read what they need to know before, wham, they click the link.
All this depends from your content itself, formatting, the words in your call-to-action, etc.
And in email marketing, you have that very specific challenge: the subject line. Just like headlines on blogs and headlines IN your emails, killer subject lines are a must if you want to capture your reader’s interest.
Now, how do you engage the recipients of your emails? As always, in email marketing it depends and testing is the key but there are some general rules.
I’ll post about them later, promised.
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