If you want to create awesome email marketing campaigns that set your business apart from the rest, it’s important to take some time to learn what makes the content and design of your email marketing campaigns stand out.

Your email campaigns should seek to:

Provide Solutions

Your audience cares about what’s in it for them. When you send them any information, it’s important that it provides solutions to problems that you know your audience has. Remember the “pain points” you discovered for your audience during your initial niche research? Use that information to give your customers and potential customers answers and solutions.

Inform, Educate and Entertain

Each email you send out should seek to inform, educate and entertain. You don’t want to be boring because people will quit opening your emails if they’re falling asleep trying to read them. Keeping your email marketing campaigns short and to the point will help. You want to link them to your website to drive traffic there for more information. Ask yourself if your email has a point, and then stick to that point.

Tell a Compelling Story

Consumers love a good story about how the products or services that you offer helped other people. If you place your focus on people and the story, you’ll get a lot more responses and send your marketing campaign into new territory – truly setting yourself apart from the others. Ask for feedback from your customers by having a contest. Let them tell their story, which you will share, then give the most read and liked story a prize.

Encourage Engagement

Never forget your call to action because you want your readers to do something after reading your email newsletter. If you don’t remember to ask your audience to do something (click through, buy now, respond, comment, etc.), they probably won’t do it. If you ask, those who wanted to will be more likely to do it. Ask for feedback, ask for stories, ask for opinions about new products or services, and your audience will feel more connected to you than ever before.

Build Relationships

Just like you can build relationships in social media and on your blog, you can also build relationships with the members of your email list. In fact, these are the people you want to truly focus a lot of attention on since they’ve already demonstrated trust in you by letting you into their email inbox. People like buying from those whom the know, like and trust; the better relationship you build with your customers, the more they’ll trust you and the more they’ll buy from you.

Finally, your email marketing campaigns should look good. Whether you choose to send a text email or an HTML email will depend on your audience. But, if you do choose HTML, you need to send out both HTML and text versions. Some markets do better with only text, and some audiences such as artistic and visually motivated audiences do better with an HTML version with graphics and images.