With the introduction of so many new ways to communicate from live chat to SMS, to social media messaging, there’s been a crazy ‘rumor’ flying around that email marketing is dead. For anyone who’s actually connected to the business world, this idea is laughable. Email is still the most used form of communication between professionals, in part because it’s not as casual and trendy as the more recently introduced styles of communication. While you can reach out to your target audience on Twitter and Facebook, contacting them directly on their phones with text messaging and emails is still the most reliable way to reach customers when they’re ready to think about your business. The key to connecting with your customers is to make sure your emails are enjoyable to open, offer your customers value, and effectively tempt them back to your business.
Ready to boost the effectiveness and returns from your email marketing campaign? Let’s look at five of the best ways to please your audience.
1) Only Email When You Have Something to Say
The biggest mistake that most companies make when they design an email marketing campaign is to put it on a schedule without worrying about what you’ll have to say when the designated dates come around. The last thing you want is for your mailing list to get used to ignoring emails from your business because they’re nothing but fluff or almost identical to what they saw last time.
If you want each email to matter to your customers, you have to make sure that they are unique, interesting, and actually convey something useful and interesting. In other words, don’t send an email unless you have something you genuinely want to say to your customers. Put yourself in their shoes. If you would ignore the email you’re about to send, your customers most likely will as well.
2) Write As If You’re Talking to One Person
Marketers get into the habit of thinking of their audience as a group. We think about our social media community, our subscribers, and our target audience as being made of many people. When writing emails, it’s all too easy to take a tone as if you’re giving a speech to a group. However, when one of your customers or leads opens their email, they aren’t sitting next to everyone else who got the email. It will seem strangely impersonal to read a message written for a lot of people when sitting alone at your desk. Instead, write your email as if you’re speaking to a single person. Use your buyer personas if this helps, but make sure that all your wording is personable, as if you are speaking directly to the reader, not a room full of people.
3) Choose Your ‘From’ Name Carefully
Who an email appears to be from will make a huge difference in their choice to open the email. Emails that are clearly sent by a company, department, or promotional account are both more likely to wind up in the spam folder or, if they do make it to the inbox, will be assumed to be spam anyway. Instead, you have two alternatives that both seem to work equally well. You can either use a real employee’s email address so that emails clearly come from a person and not an automated system or you can design a fun and unique ‘From’ name that sends the right message to your audience. Your choice should depend on who your target audience is and how you determine they are most likely to react to either a real person, a useful title, or a fun joke in the ‘From’ field.
4) Use the Right Language for Your Audience
The style of speech and turns of phrase you use in your emails will also make a significant difference in how your audience views each message. Modern consumers have been marketed to by robots more often than they care to count and at this point, we’re all pretty frustrated with robotic phone trees, chatbots, and impersonal automated emails. The best way to actually make your email recipients feel as if you are speaking to them from one person to another is to use language that matches your shared demographics. This is a careful choice depending on who your community is made up of. If you are a young, hip startup with a community of teens, young adults, and up and coming professionals, feel free to use a little slang, colloquialisms, and reference internet memes from time to time. If you have an older audience, don’t be afraid to play to that instead. Reference things that happened 40 years ago and share your grandmother’s favorite jokes. This will create a much more human connection.
5) Send Special Greetings and Offers for Personal Events
The more you know your customers, the more you can personalize your messages to them. While fully automated marketing can sometimes come off as too impersonal, you can absolutely use your automation software and techniques in combination with your CRM to make sure every customer gets a special greeting on their special days. Birthdays are easy and, if you know about them, anniversaries are also a great time to send a surprise email congratulating customers on their day of celebration. You can also have a little fun with which holidays you choose to create emails for like national teacher appreciation day or national ice cream day. With each personalized email, consider also sending a personalized offer for something that their buying and browsing history suggests will be appreciated.
When it comes to cost-effective marketing, there is still no way to beat the engaging, personable, and well-designed email campaign. The key is to make sure that each one of your recipients looks forward to your emails and feels rewarded when their finished. Whether you have a list of subscribers, are working on lead conversion, or are simply maintaining a relationship with your customers, with these techniques you are sure to see an increase in both interest and response from your email marketing campaign.
To learn more about how to improve your marketing strategies, give us a call at 661-702-1310!
