Nailing Email Marketing: 10 Dos and Don'ts for Successful Selling Through Email

When you think about digital marketing for interior designers, you probably think primarily about one thing — social media marketing. Social media marketing is certainly part of the equation, but it’s not the only kind of online marketing you should be doing. Email marketing should be part of the equation, too.

When it’s done well, email marketing has the potential to engage potential customers and ultimately convert them. However, if you want to get through to a prospect, you need to outcompete the many other marketing emails they’re probably getting. Here’s our guide to building email marketing campaigns that actually work.

1. Be Intriguing

Imagine you get two new emails in your inbox. They have very different subject lines:

• Learn About Interior Design
• Transform Your Living Room With These 5-Minute Design Hacks

Which one would you be more inclined to open? It’s probably the second one. If you want to capture your audience’s attention and keep it, an intriguing subject line is vital.

However, you shouldn’t stop there. If your reader is intrigued by your subject line, clicks on it, and finds a bland, boring email, they’ll probably click away.

Instead, when marketing interior design services via email, make sure your text uses an engaging brand voice. Including an eye-catching photo or visual at the top of the page can’t hurt, either!

2. Precision and Brevity

When you open an email, you don’t expect to see a piece of long-form content. Likewise, if your reader clicks on your intriguing subject line only to find a block of text, they’re probably not going to read it.

On the other hand, if you keep your email copy short and snappy, you’ll be much more likely to see customer engagement.

If the purpose of your email is to promote an offer or get your customers to click on a link, make sure you include more than one link (to the same webpage) in the email. If you only have one link, your reader can easily miss it!

3. Privacy Is Paramount

Unfortunately, not many people know how their personal information is used on the internet. Many companies either purchase email lists to generate more leads or sell email lists to generate more money. Doing either is a major breach of trust, and in some cases, it may even lead to legal issues.

If word gets out that you buy or sell email lists, your brand reputation may suffer. Most people won’t want to do business with a company that doesn’t respect people’s privacy.

4. Consent Matters

In a similar vein, you shouldn’t add someone to your email list without getting their express permission. Adding people to your email list without their consent might not be illegal, but it’s not ethical (and it’s a great way to annoy potential customers).

How do you get permission? One of the best ways to add people to your email list is through a lead magnet. This is something you offer a customer in exchange for their email address (and sometimes their phone number, too).

You’ve likely run into lead magnets on the internet on your own. If a website offers a free e-book in exchange for your email, that e-book is a lead magnet. Lead magnets should offer something of value to your site visitors. If they get something useful, they’ll often be more than happy to hand over their contact information.

5. Personalize Your Subject Lines

Want to boost your open rate by almost 50%? Try personalizing your subject lines. Using a customer’s first name creates a sense of familiarity, and for many people, that can make the difference between clicking on an email and scrolling right past.

You might think that this strategy would take too much time. Fortunately, with the right marketing software, you can set it to automatically include each customer’s name in your subject lines.

6. Include Good Images

Everybody loves pictures. As a designer, you know how a quality picture can capture your audience’s attention. When you include the right images in your email campaigns, you’ll likely boost your click-through rates.

Visuals are a critical part of online marketing for interior designers. When deciding what kinds of pictures to include in marketing emails, keep two qualities in mind. The pictures should be high quality and relevant.

No matter how great your email copy is, readers probably won’t engage if they see amateurish, pixelated photos. If you do a poor job of designing an email, they aren’t going to trust you to come design their home’s interior!

Relevance is also important — choose images that are connected to the subject matter of the email. This will enhance the reading experience and make your email more memorable. That picture of your cat might be cute, but unless it clearly ties into design, don’t include it in business emails.

7. Testimonials

Want to give your readers a little extra nudge toward working with you? Try including a few testimonials from happy customers in the body of your emails. Of course, you don’t want to overdo it. But a few testimonials (of only a line or two each) can show potential customers that they’ll be happy with your work if they hire you!

8. Write in a Conversational Tone

Formal language might work well in some types of advertising. However, when it comes to email marketing, conversational language is the most effective. If customers feel like they’re getting an email from a friend (and not just an advertisement within an email), they’ll be more likely to open and click through your emails.

9. Optimize for Mobile

Lots of people check their email on their mobile phones. If someone opens your email only to find that it’s difficult to read on a phone, they aren’t likely to put in the effort to read it. And because digital distractions are everywhere, your audience probably won’t come back to your email once they’re on a computer.

10. Include a Call to Action

Your marketing emails are just one step in your customer’s journey. If you want to drive sales, you must include a clear call to action in each email. The best calls to action are brief and clear — something like “click here to book your free consultation!”

It’s important to capture your audience’s attention in your emails, but it’s also critical to clearly direct their next steps.

One More Thing! Try Segmenting Your Audience

The best way to increase the odds of someone clicking through your email is to send them relevant content. However, your customer base isn’t a monolith. When you segment your customer base, you divide customers into groups and send each group its own content.

For example, if you segment your customer base into age brackets, you could include interior design memes in the emails you send to younger customers. Older generations didn’t grow up with memes and aren’t always familiar with them, so this wouldn’t be a great marketing tactic for their age group.

When you’re developing marketing strategies for interior design, always remember who your audience is!

Need Help With Interior Design Email Marketing?

Email is an essential tool when it comes to marketing for interior designers. However, if you don’t already have a background in marketing, it can feel next to impossible to master the art of email marketing while running a business full-time.

That’s where Behind the Design comes in. We offer online community, continuing education, and other resources for architects and interior designers. However, if you aren’t sure how to grow an interior design business or an architecture business, we can help with that, too.

We offer industry-specific interior design marketing. Because we focus exclusively on architecture and interior design, we’re well-equipped to deliver marketing strategies that work. If you want to learn more about our marketing services or are ready to get started, contact us today!