In part three of my 2017 email marketing trends series, I’m delving into high-quality content upgrades, videos and more. I'll also provide more insight into some other trends.

Trend 7: Higher Quality Content Upgrades

Articles, blogs and landing pages aren’t usually designed to convert customers. This type of content is generally used to educate, entertain or inspire. It’s important for brand recognition and sustaining relationships with your customers. With the right content upgrades however, your blog post or landing page could be transformed into a powerful list-building asset. How? Optimisation and high quality content using targeted free resources.

A content upgrade is a lead magnet that you give to your customers in exchange for their email addresses. Typical lead magnets include ebooks and courses, podcasts, videos or webinars. These resources can stand alone but if you tie them to your content, like say a blog post, they increase the quality of your content and give your customers a reason to sign up to your emailing list. Your aim is to add value to your content using these additional resources, offering your customers something worthwhile. For example, create a resource designed to help your readers accomplish what you have discussed in your article or what you advertise on your landing page. Resources like action sheets, cheat sheets, workbooks or toolkits are good examples. Giving these to your readers in exchange for their email addresses encourages them to delve deeper into your content and solidifies their confidence in your brand, encouraging them to become customers.

Bear in mind you need high-quality content upgrades, something with value. If your readers sign up and in exchange you offer them something worthless, they are likely to unsubscribe and not return to your product or service.

Here is a good example of a high-quality content upgrade which readers are happy to sign up for:

CoSchedule posted an article about repurposing an article: https://coschedule.com/blog/repurpose-content/

Their high-quality content upgrade here is the repurposing guide itself and infographic:

Having read the article, readers are then interested in implementing this repurposing technique for themselves and are therefore happy to sign up.

Trend 8: Mobile Friendly Emails

Every time you send an email, there's a huge chance that your subscribers are going to read it on their mobile phones or tablets. According to Litmus, 51% of users read emails on mobile devices, while it's 66% according to Movable Ink. Whichever of these statistics you choose to believe, the importance of mobile-friendly emails is clear.

Think of your emails the same way you (should!) think of your website: it needs to be responsive and display your content properly no matter what device it’s viewed on. Your emails are the same, they need to be appealing and mobile-friendly, readable and actionable. As easy to read on a mobile phone as they are on a laptop or desktop.

Here are some tips to ensure your emails are mobile-friendly:

Use short subject lines

Many email carriers won’t display an entire subject line. Since this serves as your introduction and headline, you don’t want to miss an opportunity by having your subject line cut short and therefore losing the interest of your reader. Your best bet is to keep your subject line short, around 35-40 characters. Use the most important, enticing or exciting phrase of your copy to make sure your readers take notice and open your email.

Use a single-column template

On a mobile-device, templates with multiple columns can be confusing to read and difficult to navigate. If a reader is struggling to understand your email, they’re likely to simply delete it and move on. A single column template is clean and straightforward and can be viewed with most email carriers, giving you the best chance that your audience will read your email.

Keep your emails under 600 pixels wide

To make sure that your audience won't have problems reading your emails, keep your email width under 600 pixels. Do this by setting the width attribute of your template to 600 pixels, or if you're familiar with HTML/CSS, you can use the CSS width property to make this adjustment.

Use a large font size

Using a font size of 13 or 14 ensures your emails are easily readable on mobile devices. Don’t go overboard though, too large a font and not enough words will be visible at a time making your emails look amateurish.

Use small images

Don't attach large images to your emails. These can significantly reduce load times increasing the likelihood that your reader will simply grow impatient and move on. Large images can also consume bandwidth which mobile users might find unappealing.

Include a strong call to action

A strong, compelling call to action should be large enough for your audience to easily read, at least 40 pixels square.

Say NO to menu bars

Remember this is an email, not a website. It's not necessary to add a traditional menu or navigation bar.

Test before sending

You can use a paid service like Litmus to run comprehensive tests on the most popular email carriers. They even have a free trial period to get you started.

Trend 9: Don't Just Rely on your Website to Build your Email List

You simply can't just rely on your website to grow your email list. Optimising your website and including sign-up pages is a great start, however you need to reach bigger audiences. Here are some of my tips to help you achieve this:

Use traditional marketing methods

Send direct emails to potential customers, try telemarketing to grow your email list or send a voucher in the post where readers need to visit your site to redeem their offers. These strategies may seem old fashioned, but these days they’re less expected and that may just work out in your favour. Bear in mind though that these techniques do come with a cost.

Use social media

Social media is an amazing platform. The average person these days uses 5 different social media sites. Ensure that you’re active on social media, keep up-to-date with the latest trends in your industry, promote new products or offers only available through your social media channels with an emphasis on having your audience subscribe.

Use blogs and forums

Being active on blogs and forums is a good way to build or grow your email lists. You can leave a comment with your website link on a blog that's relevant to your niche or industry. This strategy is designed to drive traffic to your website, where readers can then subscribe to your email list.

Encourage forwards

If you have an existing email list of customers, encourage them to spread the word and forward your content. You can provide them with freebies for sharing.   

That’s it for the top Email Marketing Trends of 2017. Let’s conquer email marketing this year, let’s seize the opportunities and welcome the challenges. Take risks, be curious and be resilient!


If you miss the Part 1 and 2 of our 2017 Email Marketing Trends blog series, you can check them out via Email Marketing Trends for 2017 (Part 1/3) & Email Marketing Trends for 2017 (Part 2/3).

Or share your 2017 Marketing Tips in the comment section below!


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