The 5 Most Critical Elements of Email Marketing

Marketing emails are a great way for leads to visit your website again and make their way down your sales funnel. It's simple, just include an offer, hit send, and BOOM tons of people download it, right?... not so much.

You may already be sending out marketing emails to leads, but have you been receiving the responses you'd hoped for? If not, we've put together a list of elements your Emails should contain to nurture those important leads down the sales funnel.

If you're interested in learning more about optimizing your email marketing campaign, be sure to check out our free ebook, "The Fast Track to Powerful Emails."

5 Critical Email Marketing Elements

1. The Offer/Promotion

Here's the bottom line: even if your email is appealing to the eye, the offer is the essential factor that attracts a lead to click through. All your graphics work could be wasted if your offer isn't solid. Think about what your lead wants to read and how they want to read it.

Here are a couple points to consider before starting to write your offer:

• Topic- What will your lead be interested in? Decide depending on what they already know and read.
• Length- How much does the lead want to know about the topic before downloading? What length is appropriate to describe the offer?
• Quality- Make sure the offer in your Email text has the same level of quality information that the following product has.
• Subject Line- Make sure the recipient will know exactly what they are being contacted about- but keep it interesting, or else your hard work gets deleted.

2. The Landing Page

Your lead likes reading about your offer and clicks through, awesome start! But the appeal must translate through to the next step- the landing page. Be sure that your email offer links to the correct landing page.

A couple other things to consider about your landing pages are:

• Description/ length- The description should let the reader know exactly what they will receive in the ebook, webinar etc. It's up to you to decide how much text will entice the reader without giving it all away, or boring them.
• Layout- Decide where your picture will go (left,right). Keep all important information above the fold- including the title, picture, and form field.
• Form field/ length- What do you want to know about a lead? If an existing lead comes to a landing page, program your settings to remember them to prevent question repetitiveness.
• Submit button- This seems like a minor detail, but the text inside your "submit" button might matter.

3. Your Audience

So you've changed your offer and landing page, and you know leads will like the offer and click through. Seems like it will work, right? There may be a problem with who you're sending it to. All your hard work could be misdirected to leads that don't need the information.

How to decide who to send offers to:

• Interests- What other offers are similar to the offer you are sending? Have some leads already read this offer? Figure out who needs this information, and send it to them.
• Engagement status- How often has a certain lead visited your website? or downloaded offers? Chances are, the leads that interact with you more frequently and recently will actually enjoy your offer.
• Life Cycle stage- If leads are at the top of the sales funnel, they may not want information about consultations. The same goes for leads at the bottom of the sales funnel- introductory information will not interest them. Decide who will actually want your offer.

4. Format

The format of your Email has the ability to drive more traffic to the landing page in a couple different ways:

• Text- The majority of your text depends on your offer. A conversational tone as well as personalization may interest the lead more.
• Images- Being able to look at the product while reading it tends to keep people more interested rather than text alone. Create a cover for your ebook, and it will attract more attention.
• CTA- A great looking CTA will attract a click-through, as well as make your email look more professional.

5. Timing and Frequency

Building off of all these other elements, timing and frequency is yet another factor to consider. Choose what will work best for your company. There are, of course, some general things to consider when deciding timing and frequency.

Some questions to ask yourself before hitting send:

• What day?- Try sending emails on different days and see which offers attract more attention.
• What time?- Figure out when your leads are most likely to read your information.
• How soon after?- If you've decided upon an automatic progression of offers depending on what the lead has downloaded, how long do you wait to send the next offer? Choose what is best for you situation.
• How often?- Too little and they'll forget you, too much and you'll annoy them. Find the right balance.

Without one of these, your email marketing campaign could be suffering. Decide which combinations you think would work best, then test the differences to see which one actually does. By combining all 5 critical email marketing elements, your company will nurture leads through the sales funnel more effectively.