This week’s guest post comes from Corry Cummings, an experienced SEO copywriter and online marketer (email, social media, SEO, etc.) who runs ContentCustoms and MarketingCustoms.
Here is Corry’s take on email marketing, of course with a lot of search engine optimization and copywriting going on.
Some companies still make the mistake of assuming that, as email advertisements are typically short, there is no need to spend a great deal of time developing them.
On the contrary, email marketing campaigns can actually often be more difficult than marketing through full article search engine optimization or web promotion.
As they are indeed usually quite short, a good content developer must be able to express the main keywords and points of the email in as little space as possible while not providing such a low amount of information as to no longer be effective.
Keyword centering in email marketing content
One of the first steps in developing content for email marketing is to choose an advertisement focus or keyword center. This is the main idea that the advertisement should cover.
It may be tempting to try to include multiple strong keywords or selling points in a single email but this can become distracting to the reader. Most email marketing campaigns will choose at least 10 keywords or ideas on which it will focus and develop that many emails to cover the market.
Once you have chosen a keyword or advertisement center, you can begin developing content around that idea to make a clean and focused advertisement. Remember that you will likely be developing several different advertisements on the same material or keyword.
This allows you to test each email and record the reactions or traffic that each email causes. From there, you can choose the most effective and launch more ambitious campaigns.
Developing effective email content
In general, an email marketing campaign should function much like a press release. Each email should include a line that grabs the reader’s attention with the company and services being offered and a slightly more thorough entry on the specifics of the service or company. After this, they key components when developing effective email content include:
The Main Body – Further details about the advertisement service and how it is valuable to your key demographics or customer base.
Information About the Company – A section that is intended to build credibility and trust for your company to make the advertisement more effective.
Contact Information – This portion includes links or other contact methods so that your recipients have a way to respond to your email beyond replying.
The total word count for each email should not exceed 200 words. Anything far above this number is likely too much for the recipient to read in one sitting and, if you cannot secure their order in one sitting, the email campaign will not succeed.
Remember that the email should remain professional and not include a saturation of calls to action or instructions. simply list the services and how your approach to them is the most effective. If your service prices are competitive, much of your marketing campaign will already be set up to remain successful.