Connecting The Reader With The News

Email Marketing: Connecting the Reader with the News

I often display this picture at seminars I have the good fortune to present at.  After the laughter dies, a serious message follows. When broadcasting your message especially via email marketing, you need to make sure there is a connection between the reader and your news.

Many email newsletters are used for sales and not marketing.  They are easy to spot. They usually have a corny strapline then mention the product/service accompanied by a price, an image and a link to go and buy.  These email broadcasts do work for commoditised products or services but the emphasis is always on price and margins are typically low.  These emails play a numbers game and rarely require much thought. Even good retailers don’t lead with price, they lead with lifestyle promises and create aspirations.  Price lead email selling will give you back what you asked for, low margin sales.

On the other side of the coin we are often tempted to put in news stories about our latest award or accolade, the company golf day out and the chairman’s welcome.  Stories often make our newsletters that have appeared in the mainstream media and are republished verbatim.

As a reader, I often don’t care about your award or golf day (although these activities do play a marketing role just not right now) and I sure as hell don’t need to read another “Welcome to our newsletter/website/snorefest” from the chairman.   And yes, the industry news may be of mild interest to me, but I want you to translate it into what it should mean as features, benefits or drawbacks to me.  I want to know your opinion on the news.

It’s hard to make our email marketing customer centric and not price lead.  Our enthusiasm about what we do is rarely identical to your customers.  As a marketer it is our job to put ourselves in the reader’s position and ask, ‘is there a connection between the reader and the news?’

Jenny is an ultra experienced and highly intelligent marketer.  She runs the online marketing for an Irish online retailer and has sent more email marketing campaigns than most; yet she still craves for higher open rates, click through rates and more opt-in subscribers to her email promotions.

On review, it appears that Jenny is comparing the open rates of her Back to School offer with that of her Father’s Day promotion.  One email appeals to mothers with kids between the ages of 4 and 12 and the other appeals to anyone with a Dad still alive.  The first email has four embedded links; the second email has eleven links. So how can you compare these campaigns?  You can’t!  Not even sales converted or revenues earned is a worthy metric for comparison.

1 million click throughs Booohahahah!

The new metrics of email and online marketing are based around your audience and your influence over this following.  How many times do they blog about you, re-tweet your content, recommend you to others?  What level of engagement are you having with your followers, friends or fans and what is the quality (not quantity) of your following?

Audience, their loyalty, your influence and engagement levels are all measurable.  They are a true comparable measurement of your marketing skills.  This new method of counting exposes those that are just collecting names compared to marketers that gain a following and who show uniqueness and leadership.

For Jenny it’s a numbers game of hits and clicks.  The new count is much more revealing.

Business-to-business communication has often been rumoured to work best sent sometime between Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon, which isn’t necessarily the best time to catch the attention of a top performer within a business.  At this stage of the week, they are already well through their plans, dealing with the multitude of inbound communication and filtering out as many non-essential emails as they can.

If you do decide to market on a Sunday afternoon or evening, make it look deliberate.  Call it your “Sunday Digest” so it doesn’t appear as a marketing error.  Ensure the tone of your copy is more relaxed and reflective as opposed to the punchy and forthright content you would send mid-week.  Ensure that the articles are short and thought provoking and above all give the reader something to add to their to-do list for the following week that involves your company!

This advice flies in the face of traditional email marketing advice, which is probably why this sweet spot of attention still remains. Doing what everyone else does is the sure-fire way of reducing the odds of it getting the attention it deserves.
 

1. Those looking to the Internet to help save their business as the phones stopped ringing in October 08.  Typically, this type of business needs a panic solution in a desperate attempt to try and breathe life into their sales funnel.

2. Businesses that need to improve their marketing as they now realise that big budget, off-line marketing rarely moves a potential client to take affirmative action and pick up the phone to talk to them.

3. Organisations that are ever expanding simply because they have aligned their entire business to work on the web.  They recognise that this is where potential clients check out what others think of their product or service and the web is where potential customers take affirmative action and make contact.  This can be a charity, IT solutions provider, an architect or even a restaurant.

Moving from a 1 or 2 business to a category 3 business is not a matter of money, it is a change of heart coupled with understanding and recognition that change is never easy, but always for the best.

Put yourself in the position of the recipient; pretend for a moment that it’s you.  How many times have you signed up to an email newsfeed and deliberately clicked a box stating “your email address will be sold to others so expect to get inundated with unsolicited email – do you accept?”  It simply doesn’t happen; you never give your consent to receive interruption messages from sources you don’t know.  If it doesn’t happen to you, why do you think others would give such permission? 

The result is that those that have inadvertently managed to get onto “opt-in” email marketing lists, spend their time filtering and ignoring your message.  In many cases those you are trying to interrupt feel negative and disrespected by your brand.  If a recipient didn’t ask to hear from your organisation, it is simply considered as spam!

Permission marketing is based around respect and understanding the recipients needs, with the full understanding that permission does not transfer. It is better to talk to 50 people that want to listen to your message than 50,000 that don’t.  And if you are really lucky and manage to get someone’s consent, the moment you disrespect him or her, they are gone – opted-out. Permission marketing is not easy, but it can be extremely powerful.

The secret is to build your own list.  Create a devoted following of customers and potential customers.  Give them something of interest in your newsletter; make it informative, funny, quirky and memorable, then watch your opt-in list grow.   No doubt it will take time and no doubt it will not be easy, but the business that is derived from talking to people that want to listen will substantially outweigh the business you would ever get from shouting at people that don’t want to hear.

Your email marketing message is not only competing with your nearest traditional competitor, but with low cost airline offers, credit card statements … and even the odd viral joke.

Truth be told, unless you have something that connects with me and is a compelling or quirky read, I don’t have time for you!

The answer is to find stories that engage with the audience.  Try asking your sales force what big question your customers keep asking and use that as your first story.

Create a link with your audience by connecting the second story (even if it is about your new product) with something topical in the news; say recession or high oil prices.  Perhaps your product can save us money in these hard times?

Finally, end with a story that is quirky and shows a human side to your business, like an interview with a member of staff or someone that people talk to on the phone but never get to meet.

The key is to connect with your audience and remember when creating your content it’s not about you, it’s what is in it for me!