UK home buyers are the most digitally active home hunters, with over 90% taking to online channels to research properties.
A multi-channel marketing approach that incorporates emails will help you to build and sustain relationships with your consumers – keeping your sellers and landlords happy whilst identifying prospects within your database.
Here’s how to create an effective campaign that will capture your contacts’ attention.
What does an effective email look like?
Email marketing is considered to have the greatest return on investment, with an ROI four times greater than any other marketing channel, and yet the amount of noise in your recipients’ inbox is increasing year-on-year.
Only 38% of emails in the average inbox would be considered as “relevant” to the receiver, with 62% seen as junk mail.
As a business owner, you need to pay attention to your message – and its presentation – to increase your chances of connecting with your customers.
Balance your email text-to-image ratio
Content that’s simple and easy to skim read
Prominent and well placed call-to-actions
Balance
For six in ten customers, unique photos play an important role in the decision-making process.
The majority (81%) skim-read content, so you’ll dramatically improve your chances of hitting the mark with an aesthetically-pleasing email whilst lowering your spam rating.
Once you’ve found the perfect image, your next thought needs to be for placement, i.e. somewhere within your email where it won’t force your contacts to stop reading.
Whilst images are key to creating an effective email, they should only exist to compliment the text, rather than as the sole focus.
In a recent study, half of the respondents were given a document that was well presented, whilst the other half were provided with a badly-designed one.
The findings showed a huge difference in the way that readers responded to the same message, with those exposed to the better design showing: “higher cognitive focus, more efficient mental processes and a stronger sense of clarity”.
So, to increase your email effectiveness, you need to consider your choice of typeface, including: text size and colour, as well as your use of headings and bold or italics.
Simplicity
For an email to be effective, it needs to have a strong focus on simplicity, as anything that appears to be too complex or cluttered will immediately draw attention away from the design in a negative way.
This includes text line spacing and whitespace, which improve readability by directing attention to important areas of your message.
Whitespace can be any colour, and may even refer to a background image, i.e. this is the padding around your text and images.
Digital consumers are inundated with messages and distractions, resulting in shorter attention spans than ever before at just 8 seconds. So, simple tricks like these will make it easier for readers to pull out snippets that make them want to read more.
Consumers can be impatient with poorly-performing sites and emails, with eight out of ten likely to stop engaging with a company if its content did not display properly on their device.
With 53% of emails now being opened on mobile phones, it’s important to make sure that your campaigns are fully-optimised, which means that they are responsive when displaying on all devices and fit with the screen width dimensions.
Call-to-actions
Call-to-actions (CTAs) are all about prompting your customers to click on a link that will lead them to your website or to another data-capturing tool, blog or review site.
Opting for a button instead of a text link can enhance conversions by as much as 28%, so as well as deciding on what action you’d like the customer to make – with a “contact us” or “book your valuation” imperative – you need to think about formatting.
One of the most important aspects of CTAs is knowing where to place them to drive the most traffic to your website.
By including them in your email template header, you can consistently draw the reader’s attention towards a range of links for your properties and services.
It’s recommended to include at least two CTAs in an email, ensuring that one is visible above the “fold” – i.e. the top half of an email that will be seen first – with the other placed below it and underneath the body of text.