This is perhaps the most obvious element; your email content needs to be relevant to where your customer is at in their buying journey. When potential customers first opt in, sending general information may be all that is required however as time goes on the content you send should contain information that is more specific to their needs, such as answering questions or providing solutions to queries that your prospects may have at that point.

A good way of finding out what type of content is relevant, is to ask your current customers what their experience was like when searching for your business offering.

It is important to map out their buying journey before you begin. From there, sharing relevant information at the right time can be easily planned.

Sending your customers relevant information at the right time is essential. What is equally important is that the content you send is visually appealing and easy to understand.

It is highly likely that your potential customers are busy people, with a huge workload. This means that you only have a few seconds from when they first open your email to capture their interest. If the content you send is not visually appealing, at first glance customers may not understand that this content is something that they would want to read.

Using visual content like pictures or graphs can act as the eye-catching cue customers need to sit down and read the fine print. Visuals can also help to give those that are very time poor a general gist of what the email is about, which can then result in those people deciding to read the entire article start to finish.

Keep in mind that pictures can make emails harder to load, which may deter the reader from reading your content. Keeping the number of photos to a handful and ensuring that the size of your photos is suitable for your email template will help avoid this issue. Adding in too many photos can lead to your email being marked as spam; so, make sure you use them properly and that you don’t go overboard with them.

Something else using should consider when sending emails is logo placement. It is essential that your company’s logo is in clear sight on all your content, this ensures customers won’t forget who sent them that important email.

Personalising content increases the likelihood of content being read. One of the quickest and easiest ways to personalise emails, is to address readers by their name. The best way to do this is through field mergers.

Adding in other personal details such as location and time will also add to the reader believing that the email was created specifically for them.

Furthermore, allowing your customer to customise the content that they want to receive from you, will have a beneficial affect on the amount of emails that they read from you. You can provide customers with email preferences so that they can choose how often they would like to to receive emails and what kind of information they would like to read. 

Smartly designed and carefully written content will have readers scrolling to the end and wanting more. This is the impression that you will want to give every time you send an email.

To facilitate this impression, you should end your emails with a professional yet personal touch. Signing off the email with someone higher than a business development manager will make the reader feel important and reduce the likelihood of them feeling like they are being sold to. Adding a photo or a signed signature can also make it feel more authentic.

All emails should end with a call to action, encouraging the reader to take the next step in the sales process.