1
Make Building Relationships the Priority
Stay on Top of Trends
Shift the focus of your emails from driving patient visits to building long-term relationships.
Create a consistent content cadence—whether it’s once a quarter or once a month.
Provide valuable content—people want to hear about more than your business, they want to be entertained, educated and inspired.
Include surveys in your newsletters to help uncover what your subscribers like, don’t like or want to see from you.
Key Takeaway Focus less on frequency and more on purpose of content
Mint is a personal finance app whose email marketing campaign focuses on providing subscribers with tips on navigating the complicated finance world—giving them valuable content relevant to the brand.
2
Create Concise Subject Lines
Make your subject lines brief, enticing and tailored to your audience.
Keep it short—almost half of emails are opened on mobile so subject lines should be 30 characters or less.
Keep it simple—refrain from using all caps or exclamation points and use simple language that doesn’t reveal too much about the content inside.
Test the same email with several subject line to better understand the language that best resonates with your audience.
Key Takeaway Test, test, and test
Sumo tested several subject lines to uncover what works and what doesn’t. The most successful ones were short, simple and enticed readers to see what was inside.
3
Design with Simple in Mind
Design with both aesthetic and readability in mind
Make sure the most important information and call-to-action occurs before the user needs to scroll.
Use solid color backgrounds and limit use of images—some email systems don’t recognize background images.
Include at least one link above the fold—on desktop and mobile—giving your readers what they need without having to scroll.
Optimize your design for desktop and mobile, ensuring the volume of text and size of images does not require mobile users to scroll too much.
Key Takeaway Optimize for desktop and mobile
The example to the left shows the difference between an email template that is mobile optimized and one that needs more mobile-friendly features. Dick’s Sporting Goods optimizes emails for mobile with short subject lines, high contrast text treatments and a clear call-to-action button.
4
Focus on Email Metrics that Matter
Email metrics vary
Metrics depend on the industry and target audience, and benchmarks might be different between fashion-centered and health-centered practices.
Keeping tabs on open rate averages for industries can help benchmark your email success—your practice is likely to align with health and/or retail where open rate averages fall in the middle compared to other industries.
Clickthrough rates for health and retail tend to be higher than other industries compared to open rates, which means that customers and patients who open emails are more likely to engage with your content than other industries.
Key Takeaway Track quantity and quality
Quantity Metrics
- Open Rate
- Click Through Rate
- List Growth
Quality Metrics
- Email shares/forwards
- List growth/unsubscribes
- Conversion Rate