Strategy 1: Attention for your email marketing efforts requires permission.
How many emails do you get every day? And how many of them do you read?
The in-box has become a fierce battleground for your subscribers’ attention. So let’s look at effective ways and strategies to keep your email marketing messages from becoming victims of the delete key.
1. Attention Requires Permission
You can only get the recipient’s attention if you have the explicit permission to do so.
The permission doesn’t guarantee that your email marketing campaign will be a success, but if you send without permission and your recipients get the feeling that you want to force something down their throat, failure is guaranteed.
So make sure you get your recipients’ permission, preferrably via double opt-in.
2. Know Your Subscribers as Individuals
Email marketing works best as one-to-one marketing (soon, in fact, this will be the only form of marketing that will work). The goal is to create a dialogue with your customers through messages tailored to several things: their individual needs and interests, what products they purchesed in the past (up-selling), other related products you offer that they might benefit from (cross-selling), their budget, etc. Creating this dialogue requires you to know a lot about your members. You can find out by
- tracking and analyzing their behavior and by
- asking them.
Although asking questions is up-front and you don’t have to be concerned with privacy issues, looking at what people actually do is the more reliable method to find out what they think and want.
3. Personalize
Even if one-to-one marketing is beyond your abilities, personalization is a must. Greet recipients by name. If I get a bulk email, it feels much less bulky if it uses my name — and I’m more likely to read the message and maybe risk a click or two. Often, you’ll use the first name only, but for some campaigns the last name will be more appropriate.
Of course, one of the most crucial aspects of personalized marketing is responding to individual requests. If members send you email it means they have investigated and are interested in your conferences. By failing to reply promptly, you will not only miss an opportunity but you will probably lose a customer for life. So make it a top priority to reply to all incoming mail within 24 hours.
4. Get Your Timing Right
During holidays, people tend to be away from their computers. When they return they’ll get your message along with a ton of other mail that has piled up. Chances are they will delete all but the most important messages in a rush, without a second look. This is why you should avoid conducting major email marketing campaigns during December, January, July, and August.
What’s the best day to send your email? This question is probably overrated. Nevertheless, here’s a simple rule of thumb. If your message is of vocational interest and read at work, send it on Wednesday or Thursday. If it’s primarily read at home and focuses on spare-time activities, send it on Sunday.
5. Use Subject and Sender Wisely
Since these are the main elements that motivate someone to open email, give them your best shot.
- The Sender is the easier part. People don’t take sweets from strangers, and they don’t read mail from <mailer@mail.copycorp.com>. So don’t use a mere email address; include a real name. You can even send your emails from a (hypothetical) real person’s account.
- Writing killer subject lines is more difficult. You have only about 40 characters to motivate your members to click and read on.
- That’s why subject lines must be all about benefits. The best (if not the only) reason to open a message is to find a benefit within. The recipient’s concern is literally, “What’s in it for me?”
- Don’t think you can trick recipients into opening your message. The benefit you promise in your subject line needs to be one that you can actually fulfill. This rules out all cheap teasers automatically. That’s why a subject line such as “Attend Widget World Convention at a Discount” works better than “We’ve Got the ABSOLUTELY Best Widgets! Don’t Miss Out on Our Big Discounts!”
- Questions also work, and they tend to work even better if they are surrounded by quotation marks. For example, you could try something as simple as “Want to Attend Widget World Convention at 20% off?” or “What Can Widget World Convention Do for You?”
- But avoid anything commonly found in the subject lines of spam, including exclamation marks, dollar signs, uppercase text, and the words “free”and “you.”Take a look at your daily dose of spam and learn from it about what not to do. Many email users have set up filters — either in their email program or in their minds — that move anything containing “$$$“into the trash immediately.
6. Create a Clear Call to Action
Start by defining the desired action in your own mind. Let’s say you want your members to click through to your site, read about your meeting, and sign up by clicking through to your registration form.
Recipients need to know exactly what they should do and what they can expect in return (as in the instruction “Click Here for a 20% Discount on Your Next Seminar”). Do keep the body of your message and call to action short, but make sure the message is long enough to present the core benefits.
7. Make Purchasing Easy at the Landing Page
Design a special landing page for every message you send (or for every call to action, if a message contains more than one). You’ve spent a lot of effort to get the recipient there; don’t strand them at this point by dumping them into a page that fails to flow clearly from your message to your desired action.
Make purchasing easy at the landing page. For example, if you have the member’s name, address, and credit card information, prefill the form.
8. Test, Measure, Test, Measure, Test,…
Continuous testing allows you to improve your efforts over time. Measuring click-through is a valuable tool, but don’t rely on it exclusively. Your goal is not to get clicking customers but rather to generate satisfied customers who repeatedly sign up for your conferences and recommend you to others.
In addition to tracking click-through rates, measure your conversion rate, which tells you how many of the recipients actually took the action you expected.
This still does not track customer satisfaction. Repeat purchases in response to your campaigns can serve as an indicator of customer satisfaction. To get a better understanding of how satisfied your customers are, also conduct independent surveys or focus groups.
9. Be Brave
There are a hundred things to keep in mind when designing an email campaign, and every single one has its value. But if your message goes through too many filters, it may end in the recipient’s in-box as yet another boring and conventional piece of email, quickly dragged into the Trash folder. Sometimes, it pays to be brave, be creative, and risk losing some people on your list if it results in a more effective campaign overall.
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