Improve marketing creativity and speed with email marketing templates

Email marketing is a critical element of any twenty-first century marketing campaign. While more modern channels such as Instagram or Snapchat represent the cherry on top, email remains the most effective channel for building brand awareness, converting new customers and keeping existing customers. A survey of email marketers by WBR Digital found that over 80 percent of respondents identified email marketing as the most important tool to drive customer acquisition and retention.

Interestingly, this statistic applies even among social media-mad Millennial customers. Today, email crosses demographics and devices, so marketers can’t party like it’s 1999. The key to success, therefore, is keeping it consistent and fresh at the same time, which is a tall order.

The Right Approach to Email Marketing Services

To make the most of an email-based campaign, you’ll need to understand how, when and where recipients may be receiving and viewing your emails. It’s increasingly likely that customers and prospects are viewing your emails not on desktop computers or laptops, but on their mobile devices. This is desirable for marketers, because there’s evidence that emails delivered to a mobile device have higher open rates: around 68 percent, according to Campaign Monitor.

Interactivity is another feature that’s critical to a modern email marketing campaign. Companies that send emails encouraging recipients to “do something” such as watch a video, answer a survey question, download a free whitepaper or post a comment are seeing better open rates and responses from customers and prospects.

Email Marketing Services’ Automation Eliminates the Dull Part

Today, money constraints on the average marketing department may put outsourcing campaigns out of reach. As more companies DIY their email marketing, they’re finding that email templates available as a feature with some marketing automation solutions are a great idea: templates can improve response rates by allowing companies to craft better campaigns and save time and money through automation.

While automation might seem counterproductive to a creative process, the truth is that all email campaigns share commonalities and humdrum tasks that need to be managed repeatedly across every campaign. Using templates can automate these common tasks and save marketers time, allowing them to focus on the more creative elements or take advantage of customer activities in real-time. Agile CRM offers a compelling variety of email templates designed to automate the workflow of email marketing and help marketers change up their campaigns regularly to keep recipients’ interest and build sales.

Responsive Themes

While you may be agonizing over whether to create your emails for desktop customers or mobile customers, some products will actually do this for you. Agile CRM features responsive themes that can adapt automatically to a variety of viewing devices, whether smartphone, tablet or desktop. Using a responsive theme helps ensure that your emails and updates are usable and visible to your entire client base and that you’re able to take advantage of mobile email’s high open rates.

To be certain that all your email marketing efforts display correctly, look for a platform that is compatible with many email clients, including Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook. With Agile CRM, offers an extra bonus with it you’re able to sync your email server with your CRM to pull customer emails into your primary CRM automatically.

Email Newsletter Themes

Just like every company now needs a blog, every company should be sending out periodic email newsletters. Agile CRM blends newsletter emails seamlessly into the campaign workflow and makes it easy to automate further steps in sync with your contacts’ response to the newsletters.

Templates allow you to choose your own layout, font, color scheme and more using simple drag-and-drop. Consider choosing a solution with an HTML editor, which allows you to easily insert tables, links, images and videos into your newsletter. (You can even easily create your own videos.) You can also personalize the newsletters by adding various contact fields such as the name or location of your customer or prospect.

Segmentation of Customers

If you’re spending any time at all manually segmenting email lists, you’re wasting valuable time that could be spent on the more sophisticated aspects of your campaign. With a solution that has CRM at its core, you have the tools you need to segment your email lists any way you like: by product, region, gender, age, past buying behavior or even where the customer is in the sales pipeline. You can even segment your contacts automatically based on their actions, and keep track of statistics on email opens and clicks.

Some studies have found that segmented campaigns receive up 15 percent more opens and almost 60 percent more clicks than non-segmented campaigns. If you’re not sure how segmenting is working for you, consider conducting split testing (which is easy with Agile CRM) so you can experiment with segmentation and measure the open rates.

Managing Unsubscribes

No matter how awesome your email marketing efforts are, there will always be people who want to unsubscribe, and it’s in a company’s best interest to reply to these unsubscribe requests quickly and efficiently. Agile CRM’s email marketing services include the ability to add unsubscribe links to your emails and decide what happens when customers click on those links, such as a voluntary explanation of why he or she is unsubscribing, or a special offer to keep the customer engaged.

While each unsubscribe might seem like a loss, companies can build trust and a more engaged customer base by making it easy for customers. You may also wish to use your automation solution to offer unsubscribing recipients a choice to receive fewer emails in an effort to keep them.

To succeed today, modern marketers need a simple, but powerful and intuitive solution that doesn’t require complicated or expensive integrations. Email templates won’t write the content of the email or the theme of the campaign for you, but they can leave you more time to let the creative juices flow. And once you’ve mastered the art of the campaign, you can begin to create your own email templates.