Rethinking Your Email Marketing Strategy
Love it or hate it, email marketing continues to be a strong marketing tool. For most people, including myself, our love-hate relationship with email marketing exists mostly due to spammer misuse. Thankfully, most of the obvious junk mail is usually filtered out, but even so, there’s also the issue of companies sending too many marketing emails, which can quickly become an annoyance to most people and cause recipients to opt-out from future communications.
In my own personal experience, I delete an average of 30-50 unsolicited emails every day. It’s a nuisance, given the fact that I do use a reliable email platform for my agency. I frequently spend the first 10-15 minutes of my day clearing out my inbox from irrelevant or too-frequent emails from sources I need to be in touch with, and thus choose to stay in their mail list even though many of them email me too often.
As a marketer, I often pay attention to the marketing practices that drive me nuts as a consumer and try to find ways to be effective in my profession without becoming ‘one of them’. When it comes to email marketing, less is more. Daily or even weekly emails could drive potential new buyers away. In our experience here at Concierge Marketing, bi-weekly or even monthly emails tend to generate a higher ROI.
When rethinking your marketing strategy, keep the following steps in mind:
- Ask for permission. Make sure your company is compliant with the recent GDPR rule by sending a double opt-in email and asking for their preference when it comes to frequency of email messages. According to a recent survey by MarketingSherpa, 86% of consumers said they prefer to receive promotional emails monthly. Considering the amount of email that the average person receives, following a regular schedule can keep your messages from being ignored and deleted, and will lead to a more successful campaign. If and when your messages are read is entirely up to your contact. Make sure they can easily unsubscribe from your list at any time they wish.
- Write engaging subject lines. Your subject line is the first part of your message that your contacts see and should reflect the content it’s introducing. To catch your reader’s attention, use personable language that directs readers to a specific action without sounding too much like a sales pitch. When it comes to length, the shorter the better – especially if your message will be read on a mobile device. Ideally, you should keep your subject lines under 50 characters.
- Write to your audience. The content of your email should speak directly to the reader. Knowing who you’re writing to by creating a buyer persona can help you better tailor this content. Writing in second person (using words like “you” and “your”) can add a personal touch that helps explain what your product or service can do for your reader. This message should be followed by a clear call-to-action linking to a landing page on your website with the next steps for your prospects.
- Be human. People like getting email from other people. Sending messages from the email address of one of your staff members rather than a corporate email, such as [email protected], will make it more likely that your message will be opened. Also, use both the sender and the recipient’s names to add a personalized touch. In your content, try to personalize offers and other messaging to better appeal to the recipient.
- Test it and analyze your results. Test ways to keep your target audiences engaged by running A/B split campaigns to find out which subject lines, content length, or even types of promotions work best for your target market. Like any of your other marketing activities, your email campaigns are a source of valuable data. This data can tell you who has opened your message (and how many times they opened it!), if they’ve followed any of the links in the message, and who has unsubscribed. If you use Google Analytics, you can even track who in a specific email campaign responded to a call to action or purchased something from your website as a result of an email message.
Email marketing provides you with the opportunity to personalize your marketing activities in ways that no other method does, including building and maintaining long-lasting relationships with your customers. The success of your email marketing campaign is directly correlated to your business’ respect for the reader’s privacy and the frequency of your email messages— when creating an editorial calendar for your email marketing campaigns, keep in mind that sometimes less is better.
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