Perfecting Email Marketing: Mail Merge Options, Design Principles, and More

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With email marketing currently being the best way to reach your target market, polishing your writing and design skills can boost your open rate and skyrocket your conversions. Whether you’re cold emailing to get sales leads or are writing a newsletter to previous customers, these principles are applicable in any form of email marketing. We’ll be covering mail merge options, design principles, language choices, and other miscellaneous tips and tricks in this blog.

Know Your Mail Merge Options

The best way to reach your target audience while spending less time doing so is through a mail merge program. While their features differ from software to software, most include these helpful features that save you time and energy:

• Add contacts in mass quantities
• Customize the subject line and body to include the recipient’s name
• Send scheduled email flows and automated follow-ups

Because so many of these features allow you to automate the process, you’ll be able to spend more time focusing on growing other parts of your business and improving your writing and design skills. Make sure to explore and understand all of the mail merge options available, too.

Learn and Apply Design Principles

While your open rate is important, so are your click-through and conversion rates, too. Once your recipients have opened the email, you don’t want them to regret doing so. One of the best ways to make a good first impression is with a compelling, well-formatted design that catches their attention and is visually appealing. 

Include large, bright imagery and small, easy-to-read bits of text to make the content more consumable. Additionally, allow the design to reflect your brand—if you’re fun and dynamic, show that! However, if you’re more uptight and sophisticated, then keep it classy. With simple design and branding knowledge, you can start creating professional and high-quality marketing email flows.

Use Engaging and Alluring Language

Because you don’t have much text to work with, it’s important that the writing you do have in the email is strong and serves a specific purpose. It’s important to continue your branding into your language, aligning it with your company tone while keeping it informative and purposeful.

Another important feature of language in emails are calls-to-action—these can manifest in different ways depending on the type and purpose of your email. Whether you’re looking for the recipient to schedule a meeting or buy your product, you should articulate this with an engaging and direct call to action.

Build Your Audience Organically—Don’t Buy Lists

It is crucial to grow your audience organically for a healthy open rate and maintain your brand’s reputation. Too often, we see brands get impatient with email subscriber growth and buy lists of recipient information from third-party websites. Not only is this illegal, but it can also make many recipients angry because they didn’t sign up to be emailed by you. Even if you have a small following, don’t get discouraged—it’s better to grow slowly and steadily rather than tanking your open rate and breaking the law.

Overall, keeping email marketing in your toolbelt is crucial for any modern business because of how easy it is to reach a target demographic on a more personal level. By knowing your mail merge options, choosing graphics and words wisely, and growing your audience organically, soon you’ll start to see sales skyrocket and profit margins increase, too.