The goals of every email marketing campaign are to make a measurable impact and get the audience clicking on CTAs. But what does it take to make your email marketing campaigns effective and increase conversion at warp speed?

As a marketer, you might come up with dozens of answers, and you’d be absolutely correct. However, every successful email campaign requires exploring, testing, discussing, following the latest trends, and being a regular attendee of at least one annual email marketing conference.

Indeed, attending industry-leading conferences like MailCon is an effective way to gain unique insights, connect with other marketing professionals, and learn about the latest technologies and trends in email marketing.

But before you attend another industry gathering, consider using the following tips and best design practices to take your email campaigns to another level and yield good results.

Create Strong Subject Lines

A subject line is not a design element, but it can be a crucial factor affecting the open rate.

Subject lines are as much art as the aesthetic design. Here’s what you need to keep in mind when working on them:

• Keep subject lines short but engaging and informative
• Avoid writing a subject line in all caps; only use it to emphasize specific words
• Add an emoji if appropriate
• Keep subject lines personalized to fuel the interest of individual recipients
• Avoid words that are likely to trigger spam filters

Leverage Branded Layout

It’s no secret that consumer expectations keep increasing. That’s why it’s getting more complicated to hold customers’ attention and keep them engaged.

When it comes to email campaigns, it’s crucial to keep your designs, fonts, colors, messages, images, videos, and other design elements on brand. For instance, messaging should complement the visuals when promoting specific products or offering discounts.

Fonts and colors – and other branding elements used in your marketing campaigns across different channels – should be unique and recognizable. Simply put, your corporate identity should be your visual identity.

Use a Humanization Approach

First, let’s establish what the term humanization means. In email marketing, humanization implies creating emails geared toward one-to-one engagement.

This approach helps marketers tailor emails to meet the needs and wants of individual recipients. This way, brands can ensure higher customer engagement and conversion rates.

Let’s look at the example of an email campaign launched by Death to Stock in collaboration with the Planoly platform for visual planning.

It allows subscribers to select a specific vibe by demonstrating several dynamically changing images. After choosing the vibe, subscribers fill out a short form on their website and receive a free photo project containing authentic non-stock photos.

This way, companies deliver the most relevant and appealing photo projects to individual subscribers looking to style their online planners, mood boards, blogs, social media, etc.

It might seem like marketers have to go to great lengths to keep their target audience interested and engaged. There’s no doubt that successful email marketing campaigns require a lot of focus, time, skill, and effort. But with the rise of marketing technology, many routine tasks are now automated. That, in turn, helps marketers focus on testing and campaign optimization.

Remember A/B Testing

Almost every element in an email campaign can be tested. Yes, you can test the length of a subject line, greeting variations, and much more.

A/B testing helps marketers determine which variations of content and design perform better and plan future changes or optimizations. The changes can include anything like a tone, CTA, or template.

Ultimately, systematic testing of your emails can help you determine what works best for your audience and ensure better deliverability, CTR, and conversion.

Create Emails That Resonate

Marketers are always looking to increase conversion and build strong relations with customers. In email marketing, focusing mainly on unique and eye-catching design rarely warrants a high CTR or open rate. But it gets you one step closer to your goal – connecting with your audience.

Successful email campaigns require a comprehensive approach. It often includes the latest technology, personalization, contextual marketing, on-brand layout, a lot of testing, even more networking, and continuous education. That’s how you create email marketing campaigns that resonate and transform paying customers into brand advocates.