Spam is everybody’s worst nightmare, yet for some strange reason email marketing is still a very effective way to connect with customers and stakeholders. It must be said though that not just any email campaign will get through to the mind of your intended audience.
In email marketing there are two primary elements that will decide the success of your campaign:
The strength of your database
Anyone can build a database of emails. The first prize though is to build a database of people who have chosen to receive your email. We call this “permission based marketing.”
A “permission based” database is more likely to read and respond to your email while a non-permission based database is more likely to see your newsletter as spam and therefore ignore it.
Interestingly enough, people generally don’t unsubscribe from newsletters but rather choose to ignore the email as it seems too hard/time-consuming to actually unsubscribe. So if no one has unsubscribed from your list – that’s not necessarily a good thing. Your newsletter could still be ignored.
Our advice is to use a database creation strategy that builds a permission based database rather than simply emailing everyone you can think of. In email marketing quantity means nothing, in fact it could lead to increased ignorance from your customers.
The quality of your content
This is the part that people will hopefully read. Make sure that it is scannable and that your important content is placed in the “hotspots” of the email (Hotspots are those areas on the email that are most frequently looked at naturally by the reader).
People don’t like detail about everything. In general, people want an overview of the content of the email and then the option to explore further should any content actually interest them.
Start to see your newsletter as an extension of your product/service to a client rather than a way to sell them more stock! Create content that builds trust, sparks interest and appeals to your target market and yours will be able to stay front of mind.
