Despite the–completely deserved–interest in the uses and potential of social media, chances are that you’re still using good ol’ emails for the majority of your business communications. Everyone has an email address, they go straight to people’s inboxes, and they’re easy to design and send. That, of course, is part of the problem: emails are so easy to send that many businesses forget all the principles that make for good marketing: specificity, relevance, and integration into your larger marketing efforts. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the average open rate for email campaigns hovers around the 20-30% mark (estimates vary, but this seems to be a fairly safe benchmark). Average open rate isn’t the only relevant statistic when it comes to email marketing, but I think it’s telling that just about three-quarters of the email you send doesn’t even get opened, much less read and acted upon.
How can you make your email marketing more effective? Well, I’m glad you asked. Let’s take a look at the three categories I mentioned above.
Specificity
This is a no-brainer. Just because you’ve collected X number of email addresses doesn’t mean that each of the people associated with those addresses is interested in the same things. The absolutely best way to erode the confidence of your target audience is to send irrelevant information. The way to avoid these problems is to embrace segmentation. Here’s Lyris HQ:
Smart email marketers understand just how powerful list segmentation can be, especially when it comes to lists created as the result of specific email campaigns or search ad groups. Segmented lists allow you to fine-tune your campaigns and ads to speak directly to the needs, wants and preferences of your audience.
Segment, segment, segment. The more attention you can devote to your subscribers–the less these email feel like mass missives sent off blindly–the better off you’ll be.
Relevance
This one is harder to pull off, but it’s no less important. Customers, unfortunately, do not always work on your schedule. You need to reach them when they are open to being reached or, even better, when they’re looking for an answer to a problem. As InfusionSoft puts it in a white paper on email marketing 2.0:
Ironically, most small business owners send emails when they want to run a promotion or when their sales numbers are down. Then, they can’t figure out why no one is buying.
No one is buying because your customers and prospects are working on their time. Not yours. And your only hope of closing additional sales is to be there at the exact moment your contacts decide to buy. Chances are, that moment will not occur the last two days of the month.
You can make your content relevant by getting in the head of your customers. Take a lesson from JC Penney and their back-to-school promotion, and start providing solutions that your customers need.
Integration
In some cases, the different media people use comes down to a matter of preference. I look to Twitter for one thing, to Facebook for another, and to email for a third. In those situations, you can recycle your content across all platforms, hoping to catch someone with relevant information in the place she’s looking for it. This, however, is a pretty brute force method of marketing. Sure, you could slice bread with a machete, but do you really want to? Better to highlight the strengths of each tool, giving you more precision and control. Eric Tsai of DesignDamage Blog runs through a helpful example of how this can be accomplished:
For example let’s say you have a really good article on how to do something (try not to involve your product first, focus on solving the problem then introduce your product later when appropriate), you can package it in a downloadable PDF put it on a landing page that’s highly optimize for SEO. Then abstract the summary from the content for your email newsletter so you can send your subscribers to that very same landing page, a typical web marketing campaign. But let’s take it a step further by turning that piece of content into a video (using screen capture tools like Camtasia, or with a webcam or FlipVideo) and upload it to YouTube, Ustream or Vimeo to drive traffic back to your landing page. Then post the video on your blog, tweet it out via Twitter, send it to relevant groups on LinkedIn or submitted to social network sites like Technorati, Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon.
See how much better, how much more sophisticated that is than just repeating content through the various forms of media you have access to?
What tips do you use to improve these three aspects of your email marketing? What else do email marketers need to know?
Related posts:
- 3 Basic Steps to Boost Your Marketing and Advertising Results
- Customer Specific Marketing
- Does Marketing Need to Return to the Basics?
- To What Extent Marketing Strategy?
- Free Marketing Tips
