Email Marketing: The Fundamentals
Over the next year, I’m going to be blogging each week about a wide variety of email marketing areas, ranging from strategy, metrics and design, to tools, copy writing, coding… and everything in-between. But before I start getting too in depth, I figure going over email marketing fundamentals would be a good place to start. So lets begin…
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is the process of marketing via email… simple enough? It’s getting your relevant and anticipated message out in front of your customer/consumer/prospect in a timely fashion, with the hopes of causing an action.
Relevant: This one’s tricky. I have many interests, and have signed up to many newsletters… are they relevant? Well… when I signed up they were. Are they right now? Good question. To be relevant, it needs to continually be relevant. It can’t just be a few emails of relevancy, it needs to always be.
Anticipated: When someone gives you their email address, and says ‘yes, sign me up to your emails!’, the customer has just given you their permission to contact (and market to) them. Your messages are now anticipated, and will be seen with more accepting eyes than a message sent to someone without this explicit permission.
Timely: If you offer a weekly email, send it weekly… a quarterly email, send it quarterly. By sending out your emails on a regular schedule, you begin to build on the anticipation of the reader. No longer will the recipient have to guess when they’ll receive it… they’ll begin to KNOW when to expect and anticipate it. When it gets to this point, missing an issue isn’t an option – they’ll know… and you would have just passed up a valuable email marketing opportunity too.
Actionable: Every email sent needs some basic actions by the recipient before anything to happen. From first being recognized in the inbox, to physically being opened, it’s imperative to inspire the actions needed to have your message received. Recognizing it in your inbox can be as simple as having a familiar sender’s name, with the anticipation of receiving messages from that person or company. But that’s not enough… it also needs to also have a compelling enough subject line to open the email. Once they’ve gotten over that hurdle, the copy and design needs to speak to them, and encourage them to follow through with another action – read, call, click, visit, inquire, buy, browse… the list is endless.
Keeping your readers engaged is key, because once the engagement begins to deteriorate, the question of whether or not the email is relevant comes into play. If its no longer relevant, its going to be harder and harder to generate the actions you hope to invoke. In fact, the perception of the email may change all together from being completely relevant, to being considered outright spam.
Over the next year, we’ll cover all the tricks, techniques and proven strategies to build relevant, anticipated, timely and actionable emails, designed with the recipient in mind.