In the past, offering a newsletter via email was often enough to build and grow a contact list and maintain a dialogue with subscribers. However, over time web users have become tired of their in-boxes groaning with such newsletters and have become more picky about who to hand their email address over to. This poses a challenge to organisations as they need to think more about the type of email content they provide in order to encourage someone to sign-up to receiving regular emails.
The promise of offers and free information are likely to be persuasive, but this alone is not considered to be an enticing enough value exchange. What is absolutely key is relevance. If you can demonstrate that you know and understand your subscribers’ wants and needs, they are more likely to engage with you in the first place and to continue to subscribe.
If you can make your offers and key messages targeted to your web personas within your database, you will be able to deliver a more relevant message. Offers and information can be segmented in numerous ways but typically demographic data, previous purchase behaviour and position in the purchase cycle are the most indicative of what will be relevant to particular customer groups.
The most important thing to remember with email marketing is that it’s not about sending more emails, it’s about sending relevant emails.
Our wonderful client Stephen Belcher last year invested in purchasing an email list to create leads for his photographic business. He was successful in achieving better than industry standard response rates because he segmented his dataset and delivered differentiated content to his different target audience groups. Read more about how a smarter approach to email paid off for Stephen.