Email Marketing Tips, Tough Love
Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 5:45 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine
Email marketing is tougher than other forms.
There. I’ve said it. Let the dogs of war descend. But keep the fangs in check long enough to listen to the reasons.
1. Once you send it, you can’t take it back.
With rare exceptions, hitting send is an irreversible act, as many can — to his or her chagrin — attest. Online marketing is difficult too, but you can re-write a web-page or replace it on the fly and often many potential customers won’t have seen it before you do. With email marketing you don’t get many second chances.
Conclusion: Get it right the second time. The first time should be to yourself and a small audience of interested, but objective, individuals who don’t know or particularly like you.
2. Email marketing is more personal.
True, spam and even legitimate email marketing rarely targets a specific individual, no matter how throughly dedicated to Behavioral Targeting one may be.
Nevertheless, individuals view their Inboxes as confidential, private and, well, individual. Rightly so. That’s one of the reasons people resent the intrusion of unasked for, undesired solicitations.
Getting someone to open and read an email involves establishing trust. Busy readers need to know very quickly that their time is likely to be well spent.
Conclusion: Before you send an email, decide as best you can whether you’re offering something that your target audience has a good reason to be interested in — by their standards, not necessarily yours.
3. Email marketing results are harder to measure.
Page hits, time on page, other pages visited, and a variety of other metrics allow web site designers to get a good feel for what readers are looking for. Email marketers have fewer clues and they’re harder to track and decipher.
Conclusion: Design your message as best you can so that you know what caused readers to open and clickthrough. Try different subject lines, paragraphs arranged differently, sentences worded differently, varied URLs, etc.
In short, anything and everything that will give you as much data as possible by which to judge not just THAT they read it, but WHY. (You rarely get to know how LONG they spent reading it or how many times. Maybe someday.)
Then use that data.
Email marketing is still among the most effective forms, as measured by ROI. And at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.
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Hi Jeffrey
One of the main problems is the amount of low-quality email marketing out there. My guess is that many people simply delete any messages that don’t seem to be of immediate interest, which makes it more difficult to get your own production viewed for more than a split second.
I’m producing a newsletter on Business Networking once a week. The email isn’t long, consisting of a single 300 or so word on an aspect of Networking which is interesting, and hopefully useful to some readers. Also there is a brief promotion for a web site, however from the low Click-through rate it seems that few people give the newsletter much attention.
I suppose its a case of needing to build up your ‘desirability’ over time … and being able to contact a greater number of people each week.
And, as has often been said before, the need for continual testing is crucial.
http://www.Networking-Knowledge.com