Fruit trees provide a useful email marketing analogy. Like fruit trees, different types of customers need to be cultivated in different ways if they are to bear fruit.
The problem is that when it comes to email marketing, most companies treat all their customers the same. providing the same nutrients to all of their fruit trees instead of taking time to understand that what makes an apple tree bear fruit may cause a cherry tree to produce a miserable crop.
When you use email marketing properly, you spend your efforts providing each different type of tree with personalized care so each one produces an abundance of juicy fruit.
So before you go ahead and develop that new email campaign, here’s a short primer on what you can do to motivate the people on your list to click and buy.
Talk to the right group of people
Many retailers and marketers make a fundamental (and costly) error when they create an email marketing campaign: they don’t know their own customers. I know this may sound obvious, but with email marketing it often gets messed up.
What you must realize is that if you want to sell to everyone on your list, you’ll need to use different approaches. For instance, you’ll want to use a different approach to sell the same product to men than women because as we all know, men and women are different. You can do this by breaking down your list into different groups based on demographics, buying behavior, lifestyles, or whatever you choose. This gives you the flexibility to target your promotions and offers based on specific customers’ needs and desires.
Keep your eye on design
Eye-tracking is one of the latest (and seemingly greatest) tools in the email marketers’ shed, and the performance gains made by companies that make use of it are real. Using the data accumulated from eye-tracking studies allows you to see how people read your emails and to identify visual “hotspots” where customers look on the page. You can then change your layout and design to improve performance.
When designing your emails it’s important to remember that most people view email in a preview pane so make sure your offers are prominently placed near the top of the page. But don’t place them in the header image: the majority of people make use of their email program’s image blocking function and studies show they “rarely” or “never” download images.
A few choice words
Anyone who has worked on print campaigns will tell you that long copy works better than short copy. But with email, less is definitely more. With email you have only a second to engage the reader so it’s important to keep your key message short, focused, and to the point. Use trigger words that tell the reader they need to “act now” throughout your copy and write it in a style and language your customers are familiar with.
Offers and promotions work best when they’re big, bold, clickable and placed near the top of the page. The same is true for headlines. Subject lines should be personalized, kept to 10 words or less, and include an offer or promotion with a specific call to action. The “from” line is also important: if you write from fred@teddybearsrus.com it could be confused with spam; better to use the company name or a name your customers are familiar with.
Test
One of the great things about email marketing is that it’s incredibly easy to test and track the results of a campaign. You can even monitor and make adjustments to a campaign on the fly based on customer responses, or even their lack of responses.
Taking advantage of the latest tracking and analytics software will help you discover what works and what doesn’t, and which links get clicked on most and which produce the most conversions.
To help you get the most from your email marketing, here’s a quick laundry list of 9 email marketing trends. (Compiled from a survey by e-mail service providers ExactTarget.)
- Deliverability will drive email success. Reputation, technology, monitoring, and design are the four main factors.
- Open rate is over-rated. Open rates do not tell us much about the success of an email campaign. What you need to know is: Did subscribers click? Did they call? Do they order or fill out a form?
- Email metrics and web analytics will be integrated. To have insight into what subscribers do after getting an email, marketers must integrate email with web analytics.
- Multi-channel marketing will deliver winning results. In addition to email and web analytics, the goal should be to measure and tie in all of your marketing efforts.
- List growth will be healthy, but marketers need to focus continually on list-building strategies.
- RSS will start to make an impact on email marketing. Marketers can make content for their emails available through an RSS feed that subscribers can choose to access through their RSS reader versus email.
- Rich media-such as streaming video and audio-have been difficult to include in email because of the large file sizes and scripting required. Now, better video software and increased bandwidth make rich media more realistic.
- Email is a carrier for third-party advertising. Email is attractive to advertisers because it is targeted and trackable. The key to success is that the ad has to fit with the expectations of the subscriber.
- The new metric: return on subscriber. Marketing with email will fail if marketers are focused only on the results of one email campaign versus another. The goal is to focus on return on subscriber, creating high customer lifetime value.