How To Write Kick-Ass Promotional Email For Singapore

With the increasing significance of email marketing in Singapore, more businesses are making good use of the authority to send targeted promotional emails to their subscribers.

An adequately created email can assist you to advertise your business effectively without being termed as a spammer.

It is an efficient method of marketing your brand regularly.

Email marketing results in the highest ROI when compared to other online marketing strategies.

If you have used it before or plan to include it in your digital marketing strategies in future, you have to understand the concept behind it to promote your business ethically and boost sales without upsetting the subscribers.

Although you utilise email marketing to enhance your relationship with the consumers, it should include some sort of promotion or else it is not useful.

Here are some statistics that show the relevance of promotional emails in your digital marketing:

• 61% of users prefer emails to other business communication methods.
• 81% of SMEs still depend on promotional emails as their primary client acquisition avenue.
• 44% of subscribers have bought at least once appertaining to a promotional email.

 

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Defining Email Marketing

Promotional email marketing is about reaching your list of followers through email with the single aim of increasing conversions and sales.

A promotional email can be sent automatically or manually.

Whatever means you decide to use, you will always require to add a strong and clear call to action that you would like the recipients to execute.

Despite the service or product your company deals with and the field of business, your email must attract people to take real action and that is the only way you can be able to obtain results.

As such, all elements of a promotional email link with each other to help shift the user towards the intended action.

The concept is to attract your readers to an action that will always boost the overall expansion of your Singapore business.

 

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Wrong Perception of Promotional Email Marketing

It is important to remember that crafting and sending a marketing email is not just about palpably offering discounts to your subscribers. For you to see results from your email marketing, you have to use the right strategy.

Otherwise, all your efforts will backfire.

If you want to get quality results from your email marketing, you have to create them with your subscribers in mind.

The emails have to add value to your subscribers.

Crafting emails that are all about you will make most of your subscribers mark your emails as spam and leave your email list.

Your emails have to be centred around your subscribers while promoting your brand.

Self-promotion in a manner that does not add value to the users harms your email list.

The last thing your subscribers want is to have an intolerable email marketer.

The point is that people will like your brand and allow any type of promotion if you don’t send them emails all the time.

Value their time and target giving them value to make a beneficial impression.

What this means is that you should regulate the number of promotional emails you send to your subscribers. Because your objective is to engage clients and keep them, stuffing their inboxes with emails is harmful.

Whether you wish to promote twice a month or once a week, keep your schedule regularly to avoid being marked as a spammer.

Your emails should also be high-quality and relevant.

 

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Importance of Promotional Email Marketing in Developing A True Business Sense

Promotional email marketing has made several businesses increase their revenues significantly.

Others have not even tried it.

Ensure that you send the right type of promotional emails to make a difference to your business’s ROI.

Here are some reasons why email marketing is effective:

1. Low cost: Email marketing is much less costly that banner advertising or PPC.
2. You can custom build and target your Emails the best way: You can personalise your emails depending on the various details of your subscribers. With the different email marketing tools available, you can segment and target your promotional emails easily to increase their effectiveness.
3. Building long-term relationships: A quality promotional email marketing strategy can assist you to engage with your audience and build a firm relationship with them.
4. Can be accessed from anywhere: Over 50% of email users in Singapore use their mobile devices to open emails. So, the reaching power of promotional emails is excellent.
5. Flexibility: Unlike other digital media marketing platforms, emails are very flexible. It means that you can become creative with your emails and make them part of your brand identity.

 

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Creating Quality and Effective Promotional Emails

You should ensure that your promotional emails are both well-written and good-looking. Otherwise, the design part will not offer you the results you want.

Without quality and relevant email, your recipients will not get value and will mark you as spam.

What are the steps you need to take to ensure your promotional emails are well-created based on the tastes of the users?

Let’s have a look…

1. Craft A Convincing Subject Line

A subject line in promotional emails is very crucial since it makes your emails to be noticed. Studies show that 47% of email users open promotional emails based on the subject line. If you don’t carefully create your subject line, your email open rate will reduce. This reduction will apply even to your conversion rate.

Here are some basics you have to remember when creating a subject line for your promotional emails:

2. Personalise by Name

There is no doubt that it is becoming increasingly harder to stick out in a crowded inbox. The open rates for emails have reduced significantly. However, you can make more subscribers open your emails with the aid of simple personalisation like using the recipient’s first name in the subject line.

By personalising each recipient’s email, you will be able to address them in a more specific manner. Including the name of the recipient in the subject line may seem like a small thing, but it can make a significant difference.

Personalising email subject lines with the recipient’s name does not only make them notice you, but it immediately develops a sense of relationship that is not easy to create. For example, a social media marketing agency may send their subscribers emails with a subject line like, “Keith, use these SEO tips to increase your ranking on SERPS” and increase the open rate of their emails.

3. Write Emails with The Right Length

Your subject line’s length has a significant effect on your open rate. Your subject line should remain limited to a medium range. Studies show that a subject line with 6 to 10 words tends to have a higher open rate than others. The maximum length varies depending on the area of business. But it is essential to mention that it is good to keep it short to fit on the screen of mobile devices since most email users use mobile.

4. Put More Focus on Clarity

Sometimes you have to be creative to make your promotional emails stand out from the rest. But you need to focus on clarity rather than creativeness when it comes to your subject line. Most people need to know what they will find in the emails before opening them. Subject lines that are written receive more clicks than heading lines that are cleverly crafted.

People will not open emails with a weak subject line. A promotional email with a clear subject line wins your marketing battle.

5. Enhance Your Story-Telling Power

Email marketing is about connecting with your subscribers and establishing strong relationships so that they become your loyal customers and brand ambassadors.

Storytelling can assist you to do that.

People engage well with stories because they show them that you care about their needs.

By telling your subscribers a story that relates to them, you make them see your brand as authentic and genuine.

You indeed want to promote your brand. You don’t want your email recipients to see you as a salesperson, but as an excellent storyteller. Storytelling assists marketers to develop emotional links with their subscribers.

Storytelling also enables your audience to remember your content for a long.

A perfect storytelling strategy can assist you to build a lasting brand impression that will help you boost your sales.

While other marketing strategies may not be long-term, storytelling always remains relevant.

By using stories, your marketing emails will be received in a better manner and assist you in achieving better results.

6. Create an Effective Call to Action (CTA)

You may be the email marketer out there who understands how to impress, but there is no need to have a promotional email if people are not converting.

Each of your promotional emails has to include a CTA.

Without a CTA, your marketing email has no difference from a regular email.

Studies show that the average click-through rate in email marketing is around4%. However, you can increase the CTR to about 20% by directing your recipients to a conversion.

Attracting your readers to open your emails is one part of the deal. The other part is to convince them to take action.

It is important to note that a CTA involves more than including a coloured button that you add at the bottom of your email.

Without the right instructions, the button will be of no great use.

7. Ensure that your CTA is based on the purpose

So, try to define your goals before you start developing your CTA. Ask yourself:

• • What is the particular action you need your recipients to take after reading your email?
  • What is the excellent selling point of your promotion?
  • Why should the subscribers be interested in your brand?
  • What strategy will you use to convince your audience to take action?

1. • • You need to give recipients a reason to connect to your link. A good CTA triggers the right emotions in the readers and attracts them to click through your link.
     • Avoid adding too many CTAs to your emails. You want to convince your audience to take action without confusing them. You can add more than one CTA button with the same link to raise your chances of getting a high click-through rate.

8. Avoid Being Too Much Salesy

When using email marketing, you don’t always have to target immediate outcomes. Big returns usually come after some time.

You should always focus on creating real connections, and then nurture them to ensure that there are sales after each email you send.

Individuals like to make purchases, but they want to decide for themselves not to be told.

So, avoid making your promotional emails overly salesy. Use a promotional email to spread the word about your brand.

What is not good is a dishonest approach.

Consider the needs of your audience and determine how to shape them. When you think about your subscribers, they will be happy to come back and make purchases.

9. Always Consider Benefits Over Feature

Assuming that your email audience will figure out elements about your brand without you having to elaborate on them is a mistake.

Without telling them the benefits of your brand, sending them promotional emails will not make any difference.

Even if you have to mention the features, they have to be accompanied by their benefits. People invest their money into the results that they can get by using your brand.

You have to indicate the benefits of the significant aspects that your brand features. Identify what makes your offer value to your subscribers and in what ways.

Also, explain your findings clearly in detail.

People make more purchases due to emotional reasons, and adding brand benefits tends to attract emotions.

 

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12 Email Copywriting Hacks to Give You an Unfair Advantage

The above 12 tips will increase your email open rate but may not result in sales if the copy is poorly written.

The email copy must be compelling to encourage the target customers to convert or take any desired action.

Here are 12 email copywriting hacks to give you an unfair advantage over your competitors.

All of them are acceptable to Google and the digital marketing fraternity.

• Set a Goal for Each Email

What do you want to achieve from the email? Without goals, it will be impossible to know whether the email campaign was successful or not.

You won’t be able to know whether the email copy should be used in the future to achieve the same objective or tweaked.

Every email you send out should be tied to a specific goal that is relevant to your business and measurable.

The goal can be anything from booking a slot in an upcoming webinar to convincing the recipient to buy a product and signup up for the weekly newsletter.

Borrow a leaf from the above email from SEMRush.

Everything in the email, from the subject line to the copy, is working towards one objective – finding the right keywords for paid advertising and content marketing.

• Remember to Edit Before Sending

You may be in a hurry to send out the email, but the last thing you want is to send an email riddled with typos and grammar errors.

Like other forms of content, such as blog posts, it’s essential to take at least five minutes to proofread and edit the email copy before sending it out.

Concisely, the copy should be devoid of grammar, punctuation, stilted sentences and other errors that could mislead the customers.

Your emails should stand out for being authentic, having stellar visuals, and not having grammar errors that ruin your reputation and credibility.

• Write for the Web

Writing a high-performing email copy is equivalent to writing web copy.

Adhere to the following requirements to get the most results.

• • Stick to a logical structure – stop trying to surprise customers by going against the grind.
  • Paragraphs should be short – most people don’t read every sentence; they skim through the email in search of the most critical points.
  • Every paragraph should focus on one primary idea- avoid confusion and make your copy easy to digest by ensuring every paragraph focuses on one primary idea or point.

Blocks of text are challenging to read and ineffective in conveying the intended message fast to the target audience.

Avoid them by using bulletin lists and subheadings.

• Be Very Brief

The recipient already has an idea of your brand and what it offers.

That’s why they decide to join the mailing list. With more than 300 billion emails being sent daily, the last thing you want is your email to end up in the spam rumble.

The target customers get bombarded with promotional emails every day and won’t hesitate to mark an email as spam if they feel it’s irrelevant.

Gmail offers filters such as promotion tabs to keep user inboxes clutter-free.

However, you still need to ensure that your emails are brief to avoid them being marked as spam or deleted before being read.

Make it easy for the prospects to convert or respond positively to the email by keeping them short and straight to the point.

Being concise is your best bet to having your emails read and responded to by potential customers.

Ask other digital marketing team members for their input about the copy to identify areas that should be shortened.

• Please Stop Shouting

We understand your need to stand out from the crowd and grasp the audience’s attention.

However, shouting will only make it harder for you to get results from the campaign. Spammy words such as Buy Now will trigger Gmail and other email service providers to mark your emails as spam.

Another common mistake we see brands make is using all caps in the subject line.

Subject lines that are formatted that way scream spam and negatively affect email open rate and conversion rate.

If too many subscribers report you for spamming them with unnecessary emails, the email newsletter service provider may opt to blacklist you.

• Polish the Preview Text

Preview text refers to the portion of email or snippet of the email body displayed in the mobile email app.

It helps the recipients decide whether to open the email or mark it as spam.

Like the subject line, you should ace the preview text to convince the customer that the email is relevant to them and it’s safe to open.

Think of preview text as your website pages meta descriptions.

Depending on the email service provider, it should be between 35 and 140 characters. Be on the safe side by contacting the service provider when crafting the email campaign to be on the safe side.

• Sound like a Real Person

Customers get countless automated emails from brands. Even though email automation free ups schedules, it often compromises the credibility and reputation of the brand.

With savvy customers able to smell an automated email from a mile away, such emails have little or no chance of generating sales.

The customers will be sceptical about clicking on links contained in the copy as the email sounds spam.

Convince potential customers to respond to the email by sounding like a real person.

One way of achieving this goal is by writing in a conversational and friendly way.

That is, use words and phrases that you would use when talking with the customer face-to-face.

More importantly, be full of life and sound excited to share the information.

If the email is boring, it won’t be successful in piquing their interest in your brand. Spice up the copy with a joke that is subtle and not personal. The best humour is relevant to your business – not political or religious-affiliated.

• Use Psychology to Enhance Your Email Copy

The human brain is predictable. It responds in a specific way to different forms of content.

For instance, visuals are processed faster and more efficiently than blocks of text.

Therefore, when creating email copy, consider psychology to achieve good results.

We did our homework, and here are the factors that trigger customers to read the email copy and click on the CTA buttons or links included.

• • FOMO (fear of missing out): Customers are always looking for products that are discounted or on offer. They never want to miss such opportunities to save a few bucks. Play to this element by creating a sense of urgency, curiosity and scarcity in your email copy. The idea is to show them they only have one chance to redeem the offer.
  • Use the right colours: Different colours evoke different emotions. For example, red shows urgency, green shows eco-friendly, and blue radiates confidence. Make sure the colour in your CTA buttons evokes a positive emotion.
  • Include pictures of real people: Earlier, we mentioned the need to sound like a real person. Make the email copy more relatable and human-like by including pictures/faces of real people.
  • Include social proof: New customers are often sceptical about a new product or service. Use social proof to show them you are the best option in the market. It can be a positive written testimonial to a user-generated video of a customer using the product. The goal is to use social proof to show that the product works and is trustworthy.

• Segment the Customers

Segmenting your customers will ensure that every email you send is relevant to the audience.

Segmented email campaigns record a 14.37% more open rate and 64.78% more clicks than non-segmented email campaigns.

Some of the factors that you can use to group your email subscribers are:

• • Demographics
  • Quiz and survey results
  • Recorded email engagements
  • Geographical location
  • Past purchases
  • Amount spent
  • Position in the sales funnel
  • Behaviour on the website
  • Time-lapse since the last purchase
  • Personal interests

A few years ago, it wasn’t easy to accurately group customers based on the above factors. Today, there are many tools you can use to save time.

Here are the top 5 email audience segmentation tools online today.

• • Constant Contact
  • Drip
  • Sendinblue
  • Aweber
  • ConvertKit

The groups must be regularly updated to match changes in customer behaviour and new market trends.

Use the same tools to monitor the campaigns and make these changes to point the email campaign in the right direction.

• Reward the Readers

Online customers gravitate towards brands that appreciate them for buying or taking other action.

Thus, it’s good practice to show the readers that you appreciate the time they took to open and read the email.

First, you need to capture their attention using a compelling subject line.

Then draw them in and encourage them to do business with you by writing a good email copy.

Don’t just list the benefits of the product or service.

Show them proof such as statistics or links to recent case studies. The goal is to show them they made the right decision to join the mailing list and should continue to be subscribers.

Go the extra mile and incorporate an extra gift for subscribing, such as a discount on their first purchase.

Free shipping also encourages first-time email subscribers to buy a product or service.

Carry out background research to know which kind of offer would be most relevant.

Consider your profit margin when giving them discounts to avoid cutting yourself too thin.

• Promote Action

The subject line encourages the email reader to take action, but you stand a better chance of getting more results if you include one or two CTA buttons in the email copy.

The CTA should be aligned with the primary goal of the email.

Confirm that the link on the button directs the reader to the right landing page or service page.

In addition, check how it’s displayed on multiple devices as most people read and respond to emails via smartphones.

Remember colour – use a colour that evokes positive emotions.

Here are three tips on creating the perfect CTA for your email copy.

• • Be Specific: As earlier mentioned, most people skim through the email. Be specific by avoiding vague words, verbs and meh descriptions. “Generate Qualified Leads Now” is better than “See More.”
  • Stay on Brand: Your CTA button colours should match your primary brand colours. If not, it will confuse the customer and make them doubt whether clicking on it is a good idea.
  • Use Active Words: Active words trigger action, but avoid using words considered spam.

Run A/B tests to know which CTA button colours and messaging work best for your brand.

Remember, different segments of customers will respond differently to the CTA button, so don’t get confused by that when doing the analysis.

• Stay on Brand

When writing an email copy, remember that the recipient will be interacting with your brand as they read the email, not you.

Thus, the interaction should be meaningful, professional, and memorably.

They should be able to connect the email copy and your brand by not only ready the contents of the email but also looking at the other elements of the email, such as the logo and colours.

Based on these facts, ensure you include your brand name, logo, tagline and brand colours in the email copy. T

he writing style should match your brand voice.

For example, if you run a formal company that is considered authoritative, your email copy should have professional language and crispy.

The use of puns and jokes may not be ideal as that’s not what your brand is known for by the customers.

• Get Inspiration from Other Brands

Avoid common pitfalls by researching to know what other brands that are successful in email marketing do differently.

It’s OK to “steal” their ideas but don’t be a copycat.

Instead, use their email copy and subject lines for inspiration. Keep in mind that their audience differs from yours, so only apply a hack relevant to your customers and email marketing campaign goals.

 

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Conclusion

If you have started email marketing your business using promotional messages sent via email, it is now your time to stand out.

If you have used it without a good outcome, now you have the tips to enhance your emails and make them more relevant to your target audience.

Get in touch with us for the best email marketing campaign services in Singapore.