10 Tips for Creating Email Content That Captures Attention and Engages Subscribers

How do you create attention-grabbing emails that cut through your subscribers’ inbox clutter, improve deliverability, and send your ROI soaring, as well as increase email campaign opens, clicks, and conversions? Here are some of our favorite tips and tricks.

It’s Tough to Capture the Attention of Today’s Email Subscribers!

The following are some studies and statistics that demonstrate why it’s so challenging today to develop email campaigns that capture and keep subscribers’ attention:

• In 2017, the number of consumer emails sent and received is expected to reach approximately 105 emails per user per day, and the number of business emails sent/received is expected to exceed 120 per user per day.
• Office workers check their email inboxes an average of 30 times per hour.
• Users read 28% of the words on the average (593-word) web page.
• The average adult’s attention span to stay on task dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8.25 seconds in 2015 (less than that of a goldfish).

10 Tips for Creating Attention-Grabbing Email Campaigns

Despite results that indicate shortened attention spans among today’s adults, a recent Litmus study found that the average time spent reading emails actually rose from 10.4 seconds in 2011 to 11.1 seconds in 2016—an increase of almost 7%. That’s good news, but you still have only seconds to capture subscribers’ interest and engage with them. And proactively engaging subscribers is not only essential for increasing your brand revenue, but also for determining your email deliverability. Internet service providers (e.g., Gmail, AOL, Comcast, Outlook, Yahoo!) use such metrics as open, click, and unsubscribe rates to determine whether your emails are successfully engaging with subscribers and if they’ll be delivered to subscribers’ inboxes.

Here are some great ways to grab your mailing list’s attention from the start and increase engagement with your email-marketing campaigns:

1. Invest time in crafting and testing your subject lines and preheaders. The first and most important step in getting a response from your subscribers is to catch their attention in the inboxes. Loading your subject lines and preheaders with value (e.g., telling subscribers “what’s in it for them”) and a sense of urgency to motivate action are key. Can adding emojis help your subject lines stand out in the inbox? For some target audiences, emojis have been shown to drive up open rates by 15% year over year. But testing is the only way to be sure what resonates best with your subscribers. Click on the following links for tips on writing effective subject lines and preheaders:
   • 10 Tips for Subject Lines to Boost Your Email Open Rates
   • Email Preheader Best Practices
2. Personalize your email campaigns. Using a subscriber’s name in the subject line and email message typically is a great way to capture attention. However, email personalization goes beyond simply using names. It can also include leveraging such personal information as subscriber behavior, demographics, and purchase history to make the email content more relevant.
3. Design for mobile. Likely, a significant portion of your email subscribers use mobile devices to read their emails. That’s why you should be using responsive design to ensure that your emails can be optimally viewed on all screens and platforms. For example, a recent study showed that more than 70% of users will delete an email if it doesn’t look good on their mobile device.
4. Make sure your emails are scannable and easy to read. This includes using images (both to draw attention and help quickly tell your story) as well as headlines, subheads, bullets, boldface type, and different colors to highlight the most important information. Plus, keep your sentences and paragraphs short and sweet.
5. Make your calls to action pop! Be sure your subscribers know from the moment they open your email what action you want them to take and how to convert by making the call to action prominent, customer-centric, and value packed. Click here for tips on how to optimize the calls to action in your email campaigns.
6. Get the timing right. Test both the frequency and cadence of your email campaigns to help ensure that you’re not sending too many emails too close together. In this way, your subscribers won’t get tired of seeing your emails in their inboxes and ignore them or get annoyed to the point of marking them as spam.
7. Make them an offer they can’t refuse. The email offer is another important area to test to see what it takes to get your subscribers to take notice, open, click, and convert. Whether it’s free shipping, a percentage off a purchase, or a buy-one-get-one offer, test and see what procures the biggest response from your specific email audience.
8. Add a sense of urgency. Adding a deadline to the offer—and including that information right from the start in the subject line/preheader—is a great way not only to catch subscribers’ attention, but also drive them to take immediate action.
9. Make your emails more clickable for better engagement. Make clickable as many of the email components as possible, including headlines, subheads, and images. By doing this for our clients at FulcrumTech, we’ve achieved improvements in click-through rates of more than 20%.
10. Be congruent. From the subject line and preheader, to the email headline, to the call to action, to the dedicated landing page (and everything else in between), be sure that your message is consistent and clear. One of the fastest ways to lose openers is to tell your subscribers something in the subject line that doesn’t represent the actual content and the offer presented in the email message. Or to motivate subscribers to click a link in your email, only to find themselves at a landing page that is neither congruent with the email message nor optimized to drive conversions.

Are your email campaigns capturing (and keeping) the attention of your subscribers? How are your engagement metrics, including open, click, and conversion rates? If you think there’s room for improvement, FulcrumTech’s email-marketing experts can help. Contact us to learn more.

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