The marketing emails you send should be:
- Anticipated
- Relevant
- Timely
The 3 Rules of Email Marketing. In this case , ART is science.
Anticipated
Anticipated emails are opened. Plain and simple. What is not simple is making them anticipated.
Don't over send.
This is the biggest mistake by marketing beginners. Your subscribers want to hear from you less often than you want to communicate with them. Trust me.
Let them choose frequency.
Monthly, quarterly, before events, etc. Your most interested subscribers may choose to be updated every week. Less interested subscribers maybe once a month.
Provide value.
Every email you send should provide value to person who receives it. It's about them, not you. People are wildly possessive of their inbox. Send them an email in which they receive no value and your brand will suffer.
Every time you send an email a subscriber does not value, the next one will be less anticipated. Too much of this and eventually the emails are unread or unopened.
Relevant
The best way to ensure your emails are anticipated is to make them relevant. The best way to ensure relevancy is through profiling and targeting. Profiling involves gathering more data about your subscribers than simply email address and name. A subscriber profile is built up over time and provides value to both you, the marketer, as well as the subscriber (because they hopefully receive less non-relevant emails from you).
An Example
Let's say you are a restaurant owner and you have birthday in your subscriber profile. Sending a birthday email for a discounted meal, or maybe a free desert is an example of a highly relevant email. I guarantee it will be viewed positively and will increase the chances of the subscriber opening future emails.
Surveys, simple questions, click analysis, and even offline activity can be utilized to add data points to a subscriber profile. I'll write more on this, much more, in future articles since profiling is the single most important aspect of email marketing.
Timely
Timely has to do with giving subscribers enough time to take the action asked for in the email. Using the example above, the birthday email should go out before the subscriber's birthday (of course) and the offer should allow for a bit of scheduling flexibility. Otherwise, the lack of time will be viewed negatively - "you're rushing me".
Sending an email too early can also be problematic. Put yourself in your subscriber's shoes and decide what a normal planning horizon may be. Planning for a birthday meal would have a shorter planning horizon than planning for a ski trip. So the birthday email should go out closer to the birthday than a ski trip offer would to winter.
What about personalized?
You may have read elsewhere about the importance of email personalization. Isn't that the key to email marketing? Personalization is part of making emails relevant, but not fake personalization. Most marketers think of personalization as using the subscriber's name in the subject line or as a greeting in the top of the email. This is not personalization.
Real personalization is when you send a message the subscriber is interested in, which is relevancy. Just because you say "Hi Dave!" in the email does not mean Dave will be interested in the email. Even spammers can use a person's first name and nobody would call those emails personal or personalized.
Anticipated. Relevant. Timely.
The keys to email marketing success.
