Michael Jones
Outreach to clients, prospects, and potential business partners is defined as activities that businesses undertake to establish connections and present themselves as reliable service providers.
Organisations engage in outreach with the aim of contributing to the community and reinforcing credibility for their venture by portraying themselves as responsible entities.
Business outreach via email can provide immense value for your brand and assist in reputation management. Therefore, it is a crucial component for your venture’s success.
According to a recent study by OptinMonster, 92% of online adults use email, while 61% use it daily on average. The total number of email users in the US was projected to grow from 244.5 million to 254.7 million by 2020.
Moreover, nearly 105 billion emails are sent every day, and this number is expected to reach 246 billion in the near future. Regarding email users, 99% of them check their email daily, with some spending as much as 20 minutes reading them each day.
In light of this information, let’s briefly explore some ways to improve your outreach emails, which can enhance your email marketing strategy.
#1 – Deliver a Strong Call to Action
A CTA is extremely important, and for your outreach email, it serves the purpose of delivering the punch line that can motivate your recipients and audiences to take desirable actions. Some best practices for including CTAs in your emails are:
- CTAs vary by categories, including service-based, events-based, video-based, content-based, and sales-based, to name a few. Choose them wisely, based on your specific goals and objectives.
- Avoid confusing the audience by overloading them with CTAs. At most, include two CTAs, though it’s recommended to use a dedicated CTA only once in your entire email.
- The placement of your CTA matters significantly. Popular choices include “above the fold” where it is placed on top, while others place it right at the bottom.
- Design your CTAs to stand out and look prominent. This can include utilising white space to your advantage and playing with contrasting colours.
- Lastly, keep your CTAs concise, engaging, and to the point. Avoid confusion and misdirection at all costs.
#2 – Personalized Messaging
Personalisation is all the rage these days, as over time, many urban dwellers have become desensitised to the thousands of messages they encounter daily.
What you need is a message that can penetrate their initial mental barrier to deliver a gentle touch, making them more receptive to your message.
This can mean avoiding the cold and lifeless verbosity often found in corporate environments and speaking to them like a friend, while attempting to create a sense of intimacy.
Furthermore, you should prioritise their preferences, choices, decisions, and judgments. Study your audience in detail, considering their demographics, lifestyles, interests, and hobbies.
#3 – Prioritize Your Recipients Interest
In terms of personalised messaging, one approach is to understand the likes and dislikes of your recipients and selected audiences. Several methods can be employed to learn about your target beneficiaries, such as big data. You can also practice the following:
- Write down your assumptions about them and challenge each trait using data and evidence.
- Conduct research based on user data, their interactions with your company, social media usage, etc.
- Develop customer personas and customer journey maps for your esteemed clients.
- Carry out surveys, polls, and your own investigations using digital media.
- Consider conducting small-scale surveys for a local community or studying a closed group of people.
- Competitor analysis is always valuable, and your closest rivals can offer an incredible range of insights.
- Explore similar niches in the market that may not be identical to your business but serve the same audience.
#4 – Keep it Short and Crispy
When it comes to marketing emails, remember that lengthy emails are a big ‘no’. People usually don’t have the time to read and go through an entire email. In fact, even if they have a vested interest in something, they typically skim through the email and simply pick out the important points mentioned in the text.
The ideal length is between 50 to 125 words at most. The longer you exceed this limit, the lower the response rate gets. However, if you need to deliver a detailed email, ensure that it is skimmable using headings and bullet points.
#5 – Showcase Your Expertise
Emails are an excellent way to build authority and credibility for your business. This means that you can use them to deliver powerful statements for your brand. When you showcase your expertise, it makes your brand receive more respect from your recipients. However, it’s best to keep this self-praise to a minimum.
Ensure that it delivers the message without becoming the highlight of the entire email or overshadowing the message or original purpose behind your email. Infographics and short sentences with facts and figures can get the job done without taking up too much space.
#6 – Find the Perfect Layout
The layout of the email can say a lot about its performance. The majority of high-performing emails use the Z-pattern or Z-layout design. This refers to the natural path a user’s eye follows, which is identical to the letter ‘Z’. This design layout is also quite commonly followed by advertisers in print media.
Additionally, you should strategise how much of your email will be visual content and how much will be written content.
The email should indeed look pleasing to the viewer, be reader-friendly, and not feel too cluttered or stuffed to the point where it becomes an eyesore.
#7 – Offer Something More
What is an email that promotes your business and offered products or services? It is an ad, not an email. Knowing the difference is important, as mail was originally developed to establish communication between two parties.
It is a way to build relationships, and when it comes to building relationships, gifts are excellent icebreakers.
So use this essence to offer more in your email than simply broadcasting your brands and what you offer. Instead, include extra benefits like free subscriptions, coupons, discounts, bonus offers, market reports, or a giveaway.
Make recipients feel valued so that opening your email feels like a delightful decision and not one they choose to regret later.
#8 – Catchy Subject Lines
Without a doubt, email subject lines are the first thing your recipients look at when browsing through their inbox.
Young learners seeking to request maestros to do my essay UK can also use these tactics to get maximum attention. Email subject lines can either make or break the deal. This is why you need to give them special care and compose them diligently. Some handy practices include:
- Put the most important message first.
- Personalise your email subject lines.
- Keep them short and precise in their meaning.
- Use numbers if possible, as they capture attention.
- You can even use emojis in email subject lines to stand out and make them prominent.
#9 – Interactive Media & Content
How can you make your emails more engaging and interactive for your audiences? Here are some tips:
- Include polls, questionnaires, surveys, etc.
- Include videos or links to videos.
- Add minimal animations.
- Make use of interactive gifs or graphics.
- Place links to relatable media or business-owned intellectual properties.
Interactive emails enable you to build greater engagement with your audience. This keeps them interested, which means they will spend more time reading or viewing your email.
The moment you capture their attention, that is a win for your business. Even the use of infographics can be great for building engagement.
#10 – Add Other Engagement Opportunities
Your email serves as a touchpoint for your clients and recipients. However, it would be unfair not to use its potential to link other customer touchpoints as well. Here, you can carefully place links or clickable icons that can lead your audience directly to other business-owned platforms.
Primarily, this can relate to your social media pages or profiles, your online video channel, your website, your store, online portal, blog, smartphone app, and so much more.
The idea here is to be subtle about it. These links should not, in any way, hinder the process of delivering the important message you have for your viewers. However, they should be placed in strategic locations that can still capture their attention and entice them to click and discover more about your business.
Conclusion
Many people nowadays believe that email marketing is dead or that it doesn’t hold the potential to propel business efforts as it once did; however, they simply couldn’t be more mistaken. The fact of the matter is that email marketing, especially for Millennials, holds immense value.
Even to this day, where social media and smartphone technology have taken the world by storm, emails have the capacity to provide incredible ROI (return on investment) if a proper strategy is carried out. Emails continue to hold their importance for both business communication and promotion in the present times.
