5 Tips to Improve Your Venue’s Email Strategies
As our inboxes continue to fill with offers from online shopping and takeout orders over the last year, the importance of your venue’s email strategy continues to grow. While you may think that now is the time to ease up sending emails, that is not the case.
Of course, we don’t want to bombard our customers with emails every day, but we want to make sure that we stay top of mind. Follow these five tips for your future marketing emails to make sure you stay in the inbox and out of the trash.
1. Keep it short and sweet
Keeping your email copy concise is of the utmost importance. In today’s busy society, your customers don’t have the time or patience to scroll through bulky, text-heavy emails. Get to the point of your email within the first few sentences and try to limit the amount of scrolling it takes to see all of the content. When skimming emails, our eyes tend to stay on the left side of the page and focus on headlines and bullet points.
2. Include a clear call to action
Having a clear call to action (CTA) will make all the difference as far as your conversions are concerned, and with CTAs, you generally have two simple rules to follow. The first being wording, a few straightforward sentences describing where the button will lead the reader, is all you need. The second rule refers back to tip No. 1 regarding scrolling. Having a CTA button above the fold will increase the likelihood of your audience clicking and hopefully converting!
3. Include quality messaging
Of course, this isn’t a new tip or trick when it comes to email marketing. However, it can be easy to become too caught up in the items we are promoting that we forget to make sure we are tying the story together in a relatable way for the target audience. This is where personalization can come into play, whether with automation tools or by segmenting your customers into different audiences.
Another way to add quality messaging into your emails is to mix it up every once in a while and send a non-promotional email. Providing engaging content without a sales plan, such as recipes, tips, and tricks, or thought leadership, can be an easy way to make sure your audience will look forward to hearing from you, knowing that it isn’t always a sales email.
4. Make it easy on yourself
If you’re working with automated systems, utilize them! Create templates for yourself and your team, so you aren’t creating entirely new emails for each campaign. Setting up drip campaigns or nurture programs can save you so much time and energy that you can put towards other marketing efforts.
5. Follow the data
The best way to improve your venue’s email marketing strategies is to look at the data you receive from each sent email. Looking at each email’s open rate and comparing it to one another will help you gauge a couple of things. The first is what type of content is enticing to the audience. The second is which subject lines are most effective. A/B testing (sending out the same email with one subject line to half your list and a second email with a different subject line to half of your list) can be another way to understand what kind of subject lines lead to better-performing emails.
Start with these tips and keep an eye on reports
Email marketing is not going away any time soon, which means it is essential to follow a set of guidelines like the five above to ensure that your venue’s emails will not get lost among the noise in your customers’ inbox. There is more to your daily work life than tracking email performance, no doubt about that. However, try to make time once a quarter or even once a month to check back on performance.
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Seated magazine.