77% of your prospective customers and clients don’t mind receiving permission-based marketing emails from you, according to a study by ExactTarget. According to the Direct Marketing Association an effective email marketing campaign enjoys an ROI of around 4300% – no, it is not a typo.
Have you been running a consistent email marketing campaign? I must confess, I haven’t been, and I also know that this is an extremely serious oversight, and I plan to rectify it in the very near future.
Email marketing may sound old school, but a big part of the world is still using emails and regularly checks its inbox for the latest updates, no matter how all-pervasive Facebook and Twitter have become. Despite the spam problem, most people, if well-targeted, don’t mind receiving promotional messages from you.
The relationship between compelling content and email marketing
The basic mistake that most email marketers make is that they try to thrust their promotional messages down people’s throats. They fail to realize, or ignore despite knowing that, that a sustained email marketing campaign is not about sending periodic promotional messages, it is about building relationships and establishing trust. According to this infographic, first email was sent in 1971, and by 2012, 297 billion emails were being exchanged daily. These numbers are just to give you an idea what sort of overwhelming competition you face (of course personally you’re not competing against 297 billion emails) while carrying out your email marketing campaign; so when you want people to open your email, go through it, and click the links your message contains, you need to provide them with an overwhelming reason.
The content of your emails must exactly be what your subscribers bargain for when they submitted their email ids. They were looking for information. They wanted their pain points to be solved. If they respect your authority, they wanted to remain in the loop. If you had promised to send opportunities their way, then it’s the opportunities they are looking for. If they are expecting content marketing tips, they don’t want to invariably hear from you about that e-book you want to sell.
Even if you want to sell that e-book, let there be so much value in your email marketing campaign that they come to your website on their own and purchase the e-book eagerly. Don’t spam them with your offers.
How content quality drives the success of your email marketing campaign
When it comes to email marketing your content matters at two places:
- The subject of your email
- The textual or visual content of your email
The subject of your email encourages people to open your email and read it – this is one of the biggest challenges your promotional email faces: getting people to open it. Therefore email marketing experts recommend you spend as much time on coming up with the most convincing subject line for your email as you spend creating the main content of the message. Make it highly relevant.
The content, of course, is the soul of every successful email marketing campaign. Please keep in mind that off-the-cuff campaigns rarely work unless you are offering something extraordinary or irresistible. Offer something valuable with every email you send. In fact, people should look forward to hearing from you – this is an idealistic scenario, but there are many email marketing and brand building campaigns enjoying such fan following.
What’s valuable?
This depends on your business and what you promise at the time of asking your visitors their email ids. Even if they subscribe to your email updates just in order to download some free e-book that you gave in lieu of the subscription, they will start paying attention to your updates if you provide real value.
Your email content should be well-written, well-formatted and packed with information people can immediately use to improve their businesses and their lives, one way or another.