Email marketing is an easy and effective way for you to communicate between your organisation and members, customers or prospects. Perhaps the best place for us to start though is by answering the question “What is email marketing?” You’ll have likely received email communications from your favourite online retailers, movie theatres letting you know what the upcoming films are, to emails received from your internet or electricity provider.
Using a marketing automation platform such as Hubspot, Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor ..... to name but a few will give you capabilities you don't get with plain text emails which don’t have – colour, images, multimedia links and so on. Of course, using marketing automation ensures you only deliver to the email inboxes of those on your member, customer or prospect list. This means you have a great ability to customise each email to directly target the interests of your members. These emails, quite often referred to as HTML emails as they are formatted like a webpage are fantastic when it comes to overall user experiences, visual display, brand consistency and marketing. If you are communicating one-on-one with individual members, it is still best to use plain text email.
There are three broad benefits to using an email automation platform for email marketing:
More engaging appearance
To convince your members that you have something they really need to look at, you need to attract their attention. The easiest way to do this is with a customised email design that contains your brand, logo and slogan alongside the products or services you offer. Through formatting and use of images, clickable links and even multimedia such as embedded YouTube videos, HTML emails put focus on the most important points of your email. Members appreciate this as nobody has time to read long emails with excessive information in them. These days, emails are skimmed quickly so directly the members to the most important component by catching their attention with make it so much more likely they will engage with your offering. Beyond the aesthetic value of attractive colours and layouts, using HTML email allows you to condition the response of the viewer. Using a carefully crafted template or highlighting interactive features such as buttons or links, you can direct your members exactly where you want them to go.
More leads and conversions
Email communications prompt your members to act. With clickable links and CTA buttons, you can navigate them through the email to whatever products or services you want to share with them. Because of the clickable links, you and your members are effectively able to have a conversation before even being personally introduced. These emails are very important if you want to convert members, a study by Get Response Email Marketing based on more than 1 billion emails, showed a 59% increase in user links with HTML compared to plain text emails.
Better Market Tracking
HTML emails are better than plain text emails when it comes to tracking and analytics. At a basic level - to track the open rate of an email you need an embedded HTML snippet, obviously, this means it’s not possible to track the open rate of a plain text email! Including sophisticated marketing applications that are integrated into the HTML code of your email can provide real data on your marketing materials reach and helps you to conduct cost-effective marketing research. This means that you will then be able to tweak your message over time and see how this affects your members' engagement and conversion.
Together these three benefits culminate in easier and more effective communication with your members. An aesthetic and engaging HTML email will draw in your members, clickable links will prompt your members to act on whatever products or services you are recommending, and embedded market tracking will help you to understand how best to cater to your members' wants and needs.
These days HTML emails are considered more professional. You are conveying your brand's message and telling potential clients that you mean business. For them, it is reassuring to know that they are putting their trust in a professional company or giving money in exchange for a professional service or product.
To summarise the benefits of using HTML email are:
- HTML emails are clean and easy to read
- The recipient doesn’t need to download images
- They load quickly and are mobile-friendly
- They increase the likelihood of emails being opened
- Helpful in increasing click rate
- Provide better branding opportunities
- Easy to customise
- Easy to track campaign results
- Helpful to increase traffic and leads
So, leave the plain text emails for everyday communication and use the HTML emails for the visual promotion of your brand.
If you'd like to learn more about email communications and how using them can help when creating your marketing plan then contact us today.