Email Marketing: The Game Plan

TweetEmail marketing is powerful. No question about it.

It has been said that the most powerful asset that a company can acquire is a list of email addresses.  But this would be making things too simple.   After all, if I wanted to I could call a list broker and get a list of 10,000 email addresses within a couple of hours.  They could even be targeted by demograpics, geographic location and any number of other attributes.

But that’s not the game.

Unfortunately, as with most things in business and in life, anything worthwhile is not that easy.

The Email Marketing Mantra

I wish I could remember who I first heard say this so that I could give him proper credit, but the truth is that it is nothing profound.  It is a simple statement that couldn’t be more true:

Send timely, targeted, relevant emails to people that have asked for it.

This is the end result we are looking for in our email campaign — but how do we get there?

Let’s begin at the end.

Send Email To People That Have Asked For It

Anything else is Spam.  No excuses.  If you send email to people that have not opted into your mailing list you are, by definition, sending them unsolicited email — AKA Spam.

If it makes you feel any better, sending unsolicited email doesn’t work anyway.  Think about it.  If someone sends you a Spammy email — what do you do with it?  I thought so.

We are simply too busy.

If you want people to give you permission to send them email you will need to give them a reason to do so.  When I give you my email address, I am only doing so because I expect to receive some benefit in exchange.

Do you clearly state the benefit I will receive by giving you my email address?
Does the content on your website or blog lead me to believe that you will deliver on your promise?

Send Relevant Email

When a customer or prospect gives you their email address, they have an expectation that you will send them RELEVANT email messages.  The prospect or customer is expecting something and trusts you will deliver it — if you violate that TRUST, the relationship is over.

It doesn’t matter if you have your butt covered in your Terms and Conditions or if you feel that it is RELEVANT.  If the recipient of the marketing message feels violated, you are done.

Send Timely Email

The timing of your email is a difficult question to tackle.  What is too often?  What is too little?  You don’t want them to forget about you — you don’t want them to be annoyed by you and thus end the relationship.

While you certainly don’t want to be emailing multiple times per day and you don’t want to go months without contact, the timing is something you will have to gauge with your audience.

If you increase the amount of emails you are sending and you see your open rates drop or lots of people unsubscribe, you can adjust accordingly.  I like to err on the side of too much contact and scale back if I see a problem developing.

Consider the timeliness of your content as well.  Are there new developments in your industry?  Industry events? New legislation?  Game changing technologies?

When you set out to build your email list, ask yourself:  “What could I provide to my email recipient that would provide value to them?  What can I offer that would warrant the exchange of their email address for my marketing messages?  How do I make my marketing messages relevant to my email list?

Answer these questions correctly and you are well on your way to winning at one of the most valuable marketing strategies in business.

Tagged as: spam