Content – Email Marketing Blog

20 Effective Call to Action (CTA) Phrases

Posted by Marianne Celluccion June 5, 2020June 8, 2020in Email Engagement, Email Marketing Best Practices, Marketing Strategy

A good call to action accomplishes two things:

1) it tells the subscriber or visitor exactly what they’re getting when they click on something; and
2) it gives them a sense of urgency and immediacy.

Use a command that clearly states what action you want them to take. Which are you more likely to click on: “Click Here” or “Get it Now!”? Would you be more enticed by “Download” or “Download Now, Free!”? Creating a sense of urgency entices your readers to act quickly. Of course, when the action is less urgent, you’ll want to us use a call to action that works better in your overall site design or email (e.g., “Learn More,” “See How It Works,” etc.). Ideally, you want to start your CTA with a verb.

Prohibited Content: The Shark in the Email Marketing Waters

Posted by Steven O'Brienon August 4, 2016August 4, 2016in Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Engagement, Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Marketing Content, Sender Reputation

As you dip your toes into the waters of email marketing, you need to prepare yourself for the possibility that some of your email might contain content that people don’t want to receive. This is what ESP’s refer to as prohibited content. When you send a message with content like this — snap! — you’ll feel the jaws of compliance bite down on your email program!

Take Time To Test!

Posted by Karen Frascaon June 9, 2016in Design & Layout, Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Marketing Content, Email Marketing Testing, Email Templates, Email Templates, Design & Layout

Picture this: you’ve created a phenomenal email. One of your best ever, in fact. It’s got highly compelling content that’s relevant to your subscribers, gorgeous images, and a call to action that’s practically irresistible. This email is so good, you can’t wait to put it out there and watch the clicks and conversions start rolling in. So you’re really tempted to just pull the trigger and skip the whole testing phase. After all, you know your email is practically perfect.

What could possibly go wrong?

Missing Image? Lancelot Link to the Rescue!

Posted by Steven O'Brienon June 2, 2016in Design & Layout, Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Marketing Content, Email Marketing Testing, Email Templates, Design & Layout

You want to include that beautiful photo you took, or that gorgeous artwork you created, in your latest mailing. Your image is so good, you can’t wait for everyone to see it. But there’s a problem: when your email goes out, all your subscribers see is a blank space where your image was supposed to be, along with this message:

So what happened??

The Email Multiverse – or, How Multi-Part Messages Are Like Comic Books

Posted by Steven O'Brienon April 28, 2016in Design & Layout, Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Marketing Content

As you know by now, I’m an email nerd and – surprise! – I’m a comic book geek, too. I’ve been collecting comics since way before it was cool – long before tattooed specialty shop clerks (who try to make me feel like I don’t know the history of the Justice Society) were even born! I love the golden age heroes, like Earth-Two, Dr. Fate and The Helm of Nabu – heck, he was even based in Salem, MA (just like Net Atlantic)!

So what does this all have to do with email? Aside from the fact that I’d love a shout-out from @dandidio1, @JimLee or @geoffjohns – KAPOW! – quite a bit! Take the idea of the Multiverse. Comic book authors use the Multiverse as a way to tell stories about different versions of the same hero. And each version of the hero is interpreted differently by the readers. This is similar to the idea behind sending a multi-part email message. How?

5 Keys to Avoiding a Bad (Sender) Reputation

Posted by Miller Ramoson June 11, 2015June 11, 2015in Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Marketing Best Practices, Marketing Strategy

Your Sender Score, a ReturnPath metric to gauge your reputation as an email sender, is pretty important. It determines whether or not the door to recipient inboxes is open to your email communications and whether or not you’re even a welcome visitor. Heck, it determines whether or not you can even knock on that door as email marketers with poor Sender Scores are often not permitted anywhere near the premises! They either have their emails shunted to a spam folder automatically or recipient ISPs outright refuse the delivery of their messages entirely. Your Sender Score is pretty serious business.

Read More “5 Keys to Avoiding a Bad (Sender) Reputation”

Resharing Content: A Valid Multi-channel Marketing Strategy

Posted by Miller Ramoson September 18, 2014April 8, 2015in Content Marketing

Pretty much every marketer knows that content is king and, truly, it’s one of the best avenues towards lead generation. But the sad reality we all have to face is the fact that few have both the time and/or the resources to constantly generate all that content all the time. And with multi-channel marketing – blogging, posting on social media and pushing email marketing pieces out, in particular – it’s just content, content, content across the various marketing channels. So, while it’s important to create original pieces, there is a fair bit of value in sharing or resharing existing information as well. Why reinvent the wheel? If there’s already an article, tweet or Facebook post out there that so eloquently states what you’re stumbling to say in your own words, why work so hard to duplicate their same exact efforts?

Why your email subscriber experience should be a priority

Posted by Karen Frascaon September 16, 2013July 8, 2015in Email Marketing Best Practices

Often, we email marketers get so focused on strategy, sends, and stats that we tend to forget that there are folks on the receiving end of our messages who actually read what we write. How much thought have you recently given to them, in terms of what they want to read and what kind of experience they’d like to have?

While it’s important to focus on the aspects of email marketing listed above, it’s important to keep the subscriber experience in the front of our minds as well. Read on to learn why, before we write a word, we should decide what kind of experience we want our readers to have.

How to Structure Your Content Marketing Program with the Five Ws

Posted by Karen Frascaon August 21, 2013July 8, 2015in Content Marketing

If you took a journalism class in high school or college, you might remember the basic information gathering questions you needed to ask in order to write an article: The “Five Ws”.

In this post, we’ll explore how you can use those same questions as a starting point for structuring your content marketing program. Read on to find out how!

How to use your content to get more traffic, fast

Posted by Karen Frascaon August 19, 2013July 8, 2015in Content Marketing

According to a recent post on Copyblogger, the best way to increase traffic to your blog is to create well-written posts that contain interesting and/or useful information – and use compelling headlines. Their formula looks like this:

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