Email marketing has to be one of the oldest and still most widely used online marketing tactics. Email has a lot of advantages: almost everyone has an email, it is easy to use and understand and many more. However, these advantages are also the reason why everyone and their mother is using it. The key to having emails marketing success is RELEVANCE.
How can I make my emails more relevant?
Segment
You must segment your lists. Sending the same email to everyone on your list just doesn’t cut it anymore. If you want people to read your message you need to send them a message to resonates with them. You need to have a customized message for each segment.
Know your customers: both in terms of demographics (age, gender…) and behaviors or interests. For example, if I am a male that likes hockey no use sending to me email promotions on women’s hiking equipment. You have a much better chance of getting my attention and being relevant by sending me information on hockey.
Dynamic email content can also help you add or remove content in your emails based on your segments. This has helped HP increase their open rate 300% and their clickthrough by 600%1 . Changing the content of the email can increase email relevance dramatically!
Automate
Automation is a key factor in being relevant. Its improves the timing of your email communications. Everyone would agree that sending out a Christmas email in February is a bad idea. It’s an extreme example but timing is important in email marketing.
Automation will allow to send emails at the right time to the right people. For example, you can put in place automations that will send out “happy birthday” emails on your customers birthday. You could automate an email campaign that would target purchasers of product X and suggest to them the purchase of Y. The possibilities are infinite. You can even tie automations to your segment again improving on your email marketing relevance.
Automation will allow you to send out timely and relevant emails everytime.
Making your emails more relevant does entail more planning and can increase your workload. However, ask yourself this question. Is it better to plan a little bit more and work a little more and have people actually read your messages or would you rather have your email get lost in all the clutter… and become irrelevant.
For those of you interested in increasing your email marketing relevancy you can look at PUBLITRAC our online marketing software. It has features like email dynamic content creation, automation and much more that can help you in the quest for the most relevant email.
1 –http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/hp-uses-dynamic-email-content
