Email marketing is an essential tool for interior designers and home decor businesses. This tool is used to create a systematic flow of content that displays your expertise and spread the word about your latest projects or testimonials of your satisfied customers. It’s the perfect way to make sure your potential customers hear all about your, your talents, and your services.
Email continues to be one of the most profitable digital marketing channels available for 2022, so it’s no wonder so many interior designers are looking to create email marketing strategies for their own design firms.
Over the past several years, we’ve had the great privilege of managing hundreds of email marketing campaigns and have sent over 1 million individual emails in that time, with several campaigns reaching an ROI of over 4000%.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a marketing channel that uses email to promote businesses. It’s used to inform your customers of your latest news of the company, products, items, promotions, offers, etc.
It’s a perfect tool to build customer loyalty and as well to retain your clients for the future, as you will keep your company in their minds.
It can also play a pivotal role in your marketing strategy with lead generation, brand awareness, or keeping customers engaged between purchases through different marketing emails.
Email Marketing for Interior Designers
For design firms, this strategy is a great way to remind your circle of contacts to check back on your website and hire you when the opportunity arises. Now, for interior designers and home business owners, an email marketing strategy can play an important role by showing your customer your expertise, project progress, new deals, and more.
In the spirit of passing on our learnings, here are 6 key tips to help your interior design business flourish in the world of email marketing.
1. Set clear goals for your campaigns
The first step to any successful email marketing campaign is to clearly define your primary goal.
Unlike websites or SEO, email marketing is a “quick touch” type of engagement that performs best when it includes a single primary offer with one primary goal.
The primary goal may be getting users to signup for a demo, read a blog post, complete a lead generation form, or any other action you’d like them to take after reading the email.
With only 15 – 20 seconds to get your reader’s attention, you must explain your offer and the desired next step as clearly as possible.
2. Write a compelling headline
After you have defined your campaign goal and created an offer, it’s time to focus on arguably the single most important part of an email – the headline (also called a subject line).
This is where most people fail to spend enough time and effort. They rush through the headline and in-turn, create uncompelling copy.
Tips for creating an engaging headline:
• Use question words such as: why, what, how, when.
• Use numbers whenever applicable.
• Use wording and language specific to the reader.
• Use trigger words such as: easy, free, powerful, exclusive, (or in the case above, well thought out expletives)
Example: “How to Make a Room Feel Bigger in 5 Easy Steps”
The above headline combines trigger words with a specific problem you are solving for the reader, making your reader much more likely to continue reading more. When in doubt about your headline – test, test, test.
Even if you’re not a wordsmith, most email platforms allow you to create A/B tests easily – so you really have no excuse for poor headlines.
3. Write engaging preview text
Once you have the perfect headline, the next step is to write the preview text. Similar to the headline, we use the preview text to encourage the user to open the email marketing.
Here you may want to summarize what information they will find in the email.
Alternatively, you can use preview text to pique the reader’s curiosity or give a friendly introduction without delving in to exactly what’s inside yet.
Preview text tips: Include relevant keywords that interest your readers and test, test, test.
Engagement tip: Including the reader’s name in the preview text will generally boost your open rates.
4. Create a clear call to action
Within each email you should have preferably one clear and concise “Call to Action” that tells the reader what step you want them to take next.
This Call to Action may be copy asking users to signup for a demo, read your blog, schedule a consultation, – whatever action you would like them to take after they read the email.
An example of a Call to Action:
“Looking to maximize the space of your small home? Get in touch with an interior design rep today for your free design consultation.
[Get in Touch With a Rep button]”
Having a clear and specific CTA will drastically help improve your email click through rates.
Design tip: Use contrasting colors for your CTA button to make sure it clearly stands out.
5. Get creative with your images (or GIFs)
Gone are the days of boring, plain-text email marketing for interior designers. Modern email browsers now allow you to display your brand in various creative ways that were once unavailable to email.
With images and GIFs, you can create engaging emails that are not only great to read but are visually stunning as well.
Some tips for email images: Use high-quality images for newer devices, try using GIFs to create movement, and set your Alt attributes just in case the user has images disabled.
Don’t be afraid to get creative here and send some tests to yourself to see how it looks. You’d be surprised how far a little creativity can go with email images and graphics.
6. Use Sequences & Workflows
Once the perfect campaign is ready to go, you can automate these new campaigns through sequences and workflows.
For example, say you have someone sign up for a consultation with one of your reps.
You could run an email workflow that automatically sends the reader the details and time of their meeting after signing up for a design consultation.
Or maybe you want to automatically send some educational info that will be helpful for the reader before their consultation meeting.
Perhaps you already booked them as a client and you are nurturing them by delivering valuable resources over the life of their project.
All of these, and many other options, are possible with automated email workflows.
That’s all for today, we hope you got some insight into email marketing for interior designers. If you are looking for an experience team in the AEC industry to manage your marketing campaigns, feel free to explore our marketing solutions for design-driven firms.