The fifth article in our Email Messaging Best Practices series
When presented with an informational or marketing piece, we subconsciously ask ourselves: “Is this something I can safely ignore?” This is truer than ever in today’s over-communicated world of digital marketing. The idea is to give the reader a genuine reason to be interested in a provocative and memorable way.
Fortunately, there are more tools than ever at your disposal to bring energy and immediacy to your email campaigns. In this article, we’ll take a glimpse at a few leadgen best practices you can use to amp up your messaging and increase engagement — both for your emails and landing pages — by appealing to the interests of recipients/prospects in a variety of ways.
Use captioned images to highlight key points.
Especially for time-pressed recipients, emails with long passages of continuous text are uninviting to read, encourage procrastination, and often wind up in “saved” folders that are never revisited. Well-placed images with captions help highlight the main points of your email in a prominent way. This practice can lead to deeper engagement — and even get a prospect to convert quickly without reading through the entire email.
Boost credibility with charts and infographics.
The short attention span of today’s typical recipients require you to cut to the chase quickly, even when presenting complex material. A well-designed chart or infographic can speak volumes in an email or on a landing page, while communicating key points and statistics in a telegraphic way. As with video tools, there are many user-friendly and low-cost tools available to help you compose charts/infographics that are engaging and highly informative.
Leverage the versatility of video on your landing pages.
There is a wealth of available tools and services — right down to late-model smartphones with high-resolution cameras — to enable you to affordably produce quality videos. By using an image from a video accompanied by a player icon/graphic, you can entice email recipients to click through to a landing page with an embedded or linked video.
Product demonstration videos. Informative talking-head videos featuring an inhouse expert or industry guru. A composited sequence of stills with superimposed titles or subtitles. These are just a few possibilities. Your videos don’t need to be Hollywood level. They just need to be sharp and professional.
Don’t underestimate the immediacy of audio.
Audio programming, with its unique level of direct and active engagement, is still a powerful communication medium. Especially at a time when many people consume information during downtime or on the fly.
A well placed audio-player icon with a caption can pique an email recipient’s interest to click through to an audio clip embedded on a landing page, website or microsite. It can also function as an entrée to a podcast series that explores various facets of your offering in more depth.
These are a few ideas to help you start thinking outside the box, when it comes to composing leadgen email campaigns and leveraging different formats. Anything you can do to inject additional vitality into your email and landing page formats, while communicating your key messages in an efficient and effective way, will serve to increase the engagement and pull factors of your leadgen campaigns.