One of the biggest mistakes for companies just getting started or, for that matter any company spending time with email marketing, is treating their email marketing like direct mail marketing. I also believe it is a big reason why those same companies get turned off of email marketing. The stats for email marketing do not reflect better results because so many companies are doing it wrong. It does not take much to make a huge difference in your results. Here are a few steps you can take to improve your results immediately.
1. NEVER Send Email to Purchased or Rented Lists: Big mistake… I know there are good list companies out there and sometimes it works for some companies. However, this is the fastest way to a bad reputation a company can take. If you are a direct marketer, the first thing you are looking for is the right list to purchase for your message. If you have the same mentality with email marketing, you are going to fail. Email marketing is all about the subscriber. Instead of finding the right list for your message, find the right message for your list.
There are so many ways to build your list (in fact that will be my next post) there is no reason for you to purchase a list for email marketing. The risk of having a high rate of SPAM is too great to go down this path. If the recipient of your message is not opted-in to receive the message, then they should not be getting an email. This is best practices 101…
2. Maintain a Clean List: If you have been emailing at all, you probably know people tend to use the “Report Spam” buttons more than clicking on the link you provide (especially true in the B2C world). If you are using an email marketing service worth anything, the recipient who clicks this button is automatically removed from your list. This helps you with keeping your list clean, but your reputation still took a small hit. Get enough of those “hits,” and you start to build a bad reputation.
Why not take care of the issue before it causes a problem for your reputation? Review your list every month and remove recipients who have been inactive over the last six months. Now, I know this is not what a direct marketer would do, but this is not direct marketing. You certainly can create a new segment with this group of recipients and market to them differently. There are several strategies for getting inactive recipients reengaged which can be discussed in another post. However, the take away from this is… big lists don’t mean big results. The focus needs to be on clean data with active recipients even if that means sending to a much smaller list. If they are not engaging in your campaigns, why would you waist time with them?
3. Personalize: This does not just mean sending the exact same email to your entire list with the only difference in the email being the fact that you added the recipient’s first name in the beginning of the email. What I am referring to is a more focused, personalized approach to your messaging. Data is the key. Learn as much as you can about your recipients and use that to create a message that speaks directly to that specific person’s interests.
A basic example of this approach is to create an email with dynamic content that is delivered differently based on the gender of the recipient. Instead of a shoe store sending a generic offer email out that offers 30% off of all shoes, the store could send an email out with the same offer, but with a different image for a male as opposed to a female. Take that even further… if the recipient has shopped there before and the store knows what type of shoe they bought, the image changes to that type of shoe and the message changes to “30% off of your favorite shoes!”
The more personal your message can be the powerful the message to the customer. The more the customer is going to feel like your company knows/understands them. This will affect your results immediately for the positive. Communicate directly… Interact, relate with your customer on a personal level. Don’t just blast them with another generic email that might or might not be relevant to them.
As a very general rule, if you have been in the direct marketing world for a long time, email marketing is a different beast. If you want to be successful with your email marketing campaigns, use an old trick I learned from George Costansa… Do the exact opposite of what you would do normally. Success will follow.
As always, your comments are welcome and I hope this post gave you some good ideas on how to polish up your email campaigns.
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