Is your lead generation email ready for primetime? Measure it against these 5 criteria before hitting “send.”
1. Get to the Point. By the time your reader is done with the first paragraph, does he or she know what the offer is, why he/she wants it, and how to get it? If you’re making people wade through two or more paragraphs of copy (e.g. “As a busy executive, you understand that …”) before even mentioning the offer, you’ll lose most readers before they even know why you’re writing to them.
2. Sell the Offer. Is the offer mentioned early and often? Sure, your product may be wonderful, but the reason people respond to emails is because they want the offer: the white paper, the Webinar, the information kit. Sell your product in the context of the offer (e.g. “In a free kit, you’ll discover how …”) Be sure to include a photo of the offer (it makes the offer more tangible; for Webinars, use speaker photos.)
3. Multiple Calls to Action. Do you make the reader wait until the end of the email before telling him or her how to respond? Ideally, the call to action (CTA) should appear a minimum of 3 times: once in the first two paragraphs, once elsewhere in the body copy, and once more in the sidebar. Use text links as well as buttons – with buttons alone, readers with images turned off in their email clients won’t know how to respond.
4. Highlight Key Messages. If someone were to scan the email quickly, would that individual pick up key selling points at a glance? Are those selling points action-oriented benefits – that is, do they show the reader what he/she will gain, learn, benefit from responding? (Example: “Learn how to slash time to market by 50 percent …”)
5. Avoid “White Box Syndrome.” Send a test message and view it with images turned off (better yet, use an email rendering service like Litmus). Are the images placed in such a way that they force key selling copy “below the fold” so that the reader needs to scroll down the page? Consider decreasing the vertical height of the images or moving them to the sidebar so that key messages are more easily viewable in the preview pane and on mobile devices.
For more tips on B2B email design, download a free copy of our white paper: “Top 10 B2B E-mail Marketing Mistakes.”