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Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key

Kristy — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:00:07 +0000

If you’ve done any marketing before, you know what the term “target market” means. It’s the specific group of people who are going to be the most interested in your business or product — and therefore, it’s who you want to gear your advertising toward. You should always be thinking about your target market in your email marketing campaign. Most likely, your target market will be very similar to the other advertising you do.

However, it’s always a good idea to confirm this. You wouldn’t want to design your email marketing campaign around people 40-60 years old if your subscribers are all 20-35. By now you should know that buying a generic list is both illegal and a dumb marketing move, so you should have a pretty specific group of subscribers that you can analyze.

These are the people who have come to your website and were interested in more information, or people who were interested enough in what your company does to attend one of your events or come into your store. By looking at the kind of people who subscribe to your emails, you should be able to see clearly what kind of groups your subscribers fall into. You have a target market, you just need to determine who that is.

And once you do, make sure that your email marketing campaign is geared toward that group of people. Not everyone is the same.

Is your list mainly prospective clients/customers or are they people you have worked with before? Are they interested in information and tips, or did they subscribe for products and deals? Knowing this information is going to be the key to creating relevant messages and keeping your “list churn” (the amount of people who unsubscribe) down.

Prospective clients and customers want to hear how and why what you offer will benefit them. They want testimonials and incentives. Previous or return clients and customers want to know you care about following up with them — asking how their product or service was and if there’s anything further you can do for them.

Each company’s incentives will look a bit different. Sometimes it’s appropriate to incentivize with monetary deals, like free or reduced-price products and shipping, or a buy-one-get-one-free service or coupons. Sometimes your target market may benefit more from tips and tricks or advice. Think about what is most relevant for your subscribers, and you’ll find that you have a happy list full of people who actually enjoy getting your messages.

And isn’t that the most you could ask for in an email marketing campaign?

Email Marketing Tips: #3 Content is Vital

Kristy — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:30:39 +0000

You can’t have an email marketing campaign — or any sort of marketing campaign — without content. But it’s a matter of whether or not that content is good that will separate the good email marketing from the spam. Content in vital. It’s what makes the message worthwhile, and keeps people on board to hear what you have to say next time. It’s the foundation of your email marketing campaign pyramid.

Here are our tips for making sure your content is great every time:

Consistency trumps creativity — ultimately, you’d love for your campaign to be both consistent and creative, but sometimes you just don’t have the time that month to find the perfect balance. And the worst thing you can do for your branding is have emails that are off the wall, irrelevant or unrecognizable.
Match your branding – that means the logo, colors and content in your messages should be similar to, if not that same as, your website and other marketing materials. If people can’t match you up with other contact they have with you or they can’t even recognize that the email they received is from you, they’ll probably think you’re spam.
Plan ahead, not last minute — if you’re pressed for time and struggling for content, you may throw something totally irrelevant into your message. Remember the saying, ‘if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it at all’? Well, that goes for good content too. Your subscribers aren’t going to want to read something that has nothing to do with you or your business. It’s a great way to end up in the spam pile.
Brainstorm your ideas & use a list – we recommend setting aside a designated time for brainstorming content for your messages. Think of as many as you can, without edits. Write them all down. You will need to go back later to make sure that the idea is consistent, but brainstorming provides you with a great way to come up with a bunch of creative ideas and keep them for backup. Don’t get stuck trying to think of one thing to say a day before you want your newsletter to launch — get a whole bunch of ideas that you can come back to and draw on.

Content is a way to hook a reader in and make them want to read what you have to say. Don’t spoil that or spam subscribers with bad content — you’re only harming yourself.

Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize

Kristy — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:48:25 +0000

Generic emails are boring. But it’s not too difficult — or too late — to personalize your email marketing campaigns.

Other than a boring email, why would you want to spend extra time to personalize? Because it is yet another way to develop a relationship with your customers and clients. We’d hope that building a relationship with the people you serve is a priority to you and your company — it should be — and that your goal with email marketing is to further this relationship. There’s almost no better way to do this than to personalize your messages.

Personalizing will provide you with a two way connection. First, you’ll know more about your customers, and second, they’ll see that you took the time to include some information about them and reach out.

**Now that you know why you should personalize, here’s how.**

First, of course, you will need information about your customers. Basically every piece of data you collect about those on your email list can be used to personalize a message. The important first step is to make sure you’re getting permission, of course — meaning, in this case, that each person is supplying their information to you. Like we mentioned in the last Email Marketing tip, Get Permission, it’s important that the people receiving your messages have given you the go-ahead to use their data.

The easiest way to gather information within the rules is to include an Update Profile link in your emails. This does a couple of things.

1. Initial sign-up is easy — just an email & name — so that there aren’t a thousand boxes to fill out to get your newsletter. This will make sure that you get the highest initial opt-ins, while still giving each person the chance to enter more information later. The less initial information one has to give to sign up, the more likely they are to subscribe. Some studies have shown that even just one extra box can reduce opt-in rates by 40%.

2. If at any point a subscribers information changes, they can easily find and update their profile.

This profile information can be used inside an email message, such as referring to a subscriber’s first name in the greeting or title, or to their company name in the message. It could also be used for segments to send out different, highly relevant information and deals, for example by using their zip code to let people know when a nearby store is having a sale.

The second way you can easily gather information is when customers interact with you. You can document when they purchased an item, when an item was delivered, and even the name of the sale associate that helped them.

This information is great for adding in details to your messages, or to use for triggers. Want a message to be sent to a customer if you haven’t seen them in 60 days? You can do that. Want to send a special thank you to someone for purchasing an item? That’s possible too.

Of course, you can always use Profile information for triggers too — the best example being happy birthday messages.

There’s almost no limit to the categories you can create to personalize your messages.

However…

You don’t want to go overboard. There’s no set maximum amount of personal information to use in a message — that’s a judgment call — but we would recommend you keep it to just a couple key pieces. If you include too much personal attributes, it may distract from your message or be overwhelming to the reader. It’s also a bit Big Brother, and could creep your reader out or turn them off from giving you information.

The best strategy…

Would be to sit down with your team and discuss what the most relevant, useful data about your customers would be. Is it their zip code because you have multiple stores? Is it their birthday so that you can provide special incentives and deals? Is it just who last helped them in the store so they know who to ask for in the future?

Figure these sort of things out, and decide on the methods you’ll use to collect that data. Get to know the people you serve and personalize your messages for them. The benefits are greater than you might imagine.