Create e-mail messages that move customers to action

Despite spammers and in-box overload, e-mail remains an amazingly effective and inexpensive marketing tool. Why?

• E-mail can keep your customers more informed more quickly than just about any other marketing. That will motivate sales.
• E-mail can strengthen your bond with customers. When done right, its ability to create viral, friend-to-friend connections reels in prospects faster than any other marketing activity. That, too, is the path to sales.
• E-news can promptly and cheaply broadcast timely announcements, special offers, media news, and events, making customers feel like valued insiders. That creates loyal—and repeat—customers. (See the E-Mail Marketing feature of Office Live Small Business.)

Still, there’s no question that e-mail fatigue can set in fast. You have only a fleeting opportunity to reach a prospect and get that customer to respond to your offer.

It's up to you to craft e-messaging that:

1. grabs your reader’s attention;
2. motivates someone to open the e-mail, and
3. generates click-through response.

Here's how to develop e-marketing with a three-part punch.

First, lose the heavy graphics and images

E-messages, of course, often blend three key elements—text, images, and graphics.

It's important that the look of your messages is crisp and professional. On the other hand, overdoing illustrations, colorful graphics or other images can quickly lead to botched delivery among other problems.

For one, images in e-mail tend to trigger spam blockers and filters, which then bounce the message back or send it straight to the junk-mail folder. (See these tips on how to avoid spam filters.)

Image-heavy messages also take longer to open, which could cause someone to delete it straight away. Once open, messages with a great many images or illustrations may look distorted or out of sync depending on the recipient’s individual software settings or system.

Finally, image-filled messages tend to look amateur or unprofessional, which risks boring or annoying your customers.

"Often business owners like pretty graphics, but prospects don’t much care about them," says Winton Churchill, a Los Angeles marketing consultant who specializes in lead-generation systems.

Successful e-marketers strongly advise business owners who send out e-mail promotions to:

• avoid HTML settings, which can make a message look distorted in some e-mail programs or settings
• rely on text only
• resist impulses to include images and graphics
• resist including attachments

Instead of investing in art, says Churchill: "Invest in a good copywriter."

Write copy that makes customers click

When you're ready to focus on effective copy, e-marketers offer these proven tips that will encourage customers to open your e-mails.

• Language matters.   Begin by adjusting your own attitude, says Jesse Kornbluth, who runs HeadButler.com, a cultural blog. "I consider my readers as friends and my site as a community. So my e-mails are personal and intimate—and fun." For instance, he says: "'The perfect gift' is dead language, and not actionable. But 'the gift only you would give' is a personal invitation."
• Avoid jargon.   Until you learn more about your recipients and their level of knowledge in your field, don't use specialized terms, industry slang or buzzwords that could annoy them or go over their heads. Stick to straightforward language. Later on, when you've identified your customers, you can consider industry-specific vocabulary.
• Read your messages out loud.   Before sending, read the message aloud and listen to all the nuances, says Mark Amtower, a Maryland-based marketing consultant who focuses on doing business with the government. That way you can "hear" how the message reads and whether your tone and pitch are appropriate.
• Questions invite answers.   Subject lines that ask a really smart question suggest that the answer is in your message. The customer will click out of curiosity. (Don't overdo this tactic, of course.)

Use smart calls to action

After a customer clicks on your message, the final step is to generate a response. Ask the recipient to do something and you’re likely to get a better response. Here are some smart ways to set up a call to action.

• Ask for only one thing.   If you ask customers to choose among two or three options, they tend to click off—it's too complicated. "You can cut responses by 50 percent or more by offering more than one option," Churchill says.
• Solicit feedback.   That can begin a dialogue and, as we know, the stronger the relationship, the more likely your customer will trust you and buy. Feedback can consist of linking to your site to post comments or linking to a special page to register personal information about the offers he or she wants to receive. You can also ask customers to fill out a survey. Adding an incentive in exchange for their personal data or response can increase the odds of a response. Consider free samples, a discount, or access to insider information or industry reports.
• Refer to specific problems and pain.   Then offer insights into remedies in your call to action—your customers will need to click the link and register to receive information. As above, this might be an article or a free sample.
• Link to your Web site.   Many products, of course, benefit from seeing images and full-color treatment. If that’s true for your business or if you want to include information about, say, an invitation to an event or conference schedule, add a link in the e-mail to your Web site, suggests Shel Horowitz, marketing consultant and author in Hadley, Mass. (If you don't have a Web site, see this page.)
• Make it easy.   When linking to your site, don’t dump the customer on your home page. Create a customized landing page that spells out the offer you promoted in the message, or link directly to the product or service page you promoted, so they don't have to hunt for it.

Any and all of these tips should help your e-mail marketing program succeed. Just don't forget to also include an opt-out method so your customer feels that he or she is in control of your communications.

About the author   Joanna L. Krotz is the founder of Muse2Muse Productions, a custom content company for business and consumer magazines, newsletters, and digital imprints. Krotz has launched marketing Web sites and e-news portals, as well as created magazines and online marketing for a variety of companies. She is co-author of The Microsoft Small Business Kit, a 500-page guide to launching and running a small business.