By Paul Bates, UK Managing Director, StrongMail UK
February marks the advent of Valentine’s Day, a time at which relationship building, strengthening and, God forbid, breaking is at the forefront of everyone’s minds.
Therefore I thought it would be timely to take a look at the way in which email, when used correctly, can help strengthen the relationships between companies and their customers – and how, when companies misuse the technology, it can be one of the biggest causes of resentment, hassle and heartache on both sides.
When email marketing works at its best, companies can use it to deliver useful, timely and relevant content to their customers with minimal costs.
However, all too often customers are presented with ubiquitous, low value and unimaginative content, which they direct – usually unopened – straight into their junk mail folders. This means customers initially ignore content but become increasingly angry – eventually distancing themselves from the supplier.
To avoid these pitfalls, and drive deliverability upwards, email marketers need to make customers feel like they are valued, rather than just one line item in a database of millions. While there are many best-practices email marketers should follow, keeping to the basics is often the best starting point for any campaign.
The best piece of advice I can give marketers is to think about their customers as people first and purchasers second. In other words, think about all the unwanted emails you received this morning, what annoyed you about them and then check that the emails you’re preparing don’t have the same annoying attributes.
I think it’s amazing that this level of introspection doesn’t take place when email campaigns are conceived and executed.
If your customers think they’re just being targeted just because you want them to buy something, they’ll immediately be turned off. If, however, you can offer them something interesting or relevant, then they’ll treat your email with more patience and tolerance – and you’ll be more likely to get a sale from it.
One of the most effective ways to influence your subscribers is by integrating your email with a channel that is quite simply everywhere at the moment, social media. There are four basic motivators for social engagement: self-expression, status achievement, altruism, and self-interest.
Recognising what motivates your subscriber base will help you develop email content that is share-worthy, and ultimately more likely to expand your brand.
The next thing you should ask yourself is whether you have direct control over your email marketing strategy. As a marketer, you’ll have worked hard and invested a lot of time and energy in building your company’s brand.
All that work can be destroyed by a badly conceived and executed email campaign – and that’s more likely to happen if you put your valued brand and trusted data in someone else’s hands.
It sounds boring but if you maintain direct access to the data and have a close, dynamic relationship with it, then you’ll start to develop proportionately closer relationships with your customers.
Therefore, before all the creative work starts, marketers need to build a clean and easily modifiable database – one that allows for easy unsubscribe updates to be made and that is capable of storing comprehensive marketing metadata – such as recent purchases, birthdays or anniversaries and hobbies.
Finally, think about the frequency of your campaigns - get the balance right and don’t bug your customers. A good email-based relationship is based on trust, consistency and the delivery of high-value content.
For example - don’t keep changing sender addresses for each campaign. If recipients add it to their safe senders list, and then you change it for the next campaign, your next email is more likely to end up in their junk mail folder.
So as you begin building out, or revising, your email strategy, take a few moments to understand what motivates your subscriber base, what kind of content they would like to receive and how often it should be sent. It may be the difference between a red rose and a broken heart this Valentine’s.
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