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Creative Components of Successful Email Campaigns: Email Content

Content:  Many ISPs deliver messages with the images turned off so you cannot rely on graphics to connect with your audience.  You must use a creative headline and content that is easy for your recipients to scan through quickly while giving them a reason to spend more time reading and reviewing your message in detail.

For the content to engage the audience, it must be emotional, active, and straightforward.  The art of writing content is to author enticing messages that can stand alone without needing images to convey emotions.  You must choose your words carefully, noting the impact and implication of each and every word, and you must articulate clearly and concisely so your readers are not distracted or confused.  Most importantly, you must provide information that is relevant and important to each member of your audience.  That is the science.

The science of writing the correct content has to do with delivering the right message to each individual recipient.  This is accomplished using preference centers and subscriber data, such as gender, location, age, title, hobbies, purchase history, wish lists, and clickstream data.  Instead of mailing out a generic, one size fits all email to your entire list, segmenting your list by preferences allows you to target specific groups to send messages that apply to them directly.  Many email marketing solutions, such as Listrak, have automated segmentation features such as profiling filters and dynamic content tools as these tools can practically double your click-through rates. 

Preference-based email marketing begins with the quality of your list.  While there are some cases where purchasing a list could generate some traffic to your website, a much better approach is to ask your customers and website visitors at a specific point in the sales cycle if they are interested in subscribing to your email list.

Acquiring personal information from your customers is an art form unto itself as it takes skills and finesse to make strangers feel comfortable enough to share their data with you.  One way to help build trust is to have a privacy policy stated on the opt-in form.  This lets your customers know that you value them and that you will not sell their private information to outside vendors.  Another way to build trust is to state upfront what your delivery schedule is and allow your subscribers to select how often they hear from you.  Giving your subscribers control over their accounts will greatly increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns as you will only send emails to those subscribers that want to receive the information.

You want to be sure to gather the right data that is relevant to your offerings without requiring too much personal information, and it is not always easy to tell how much is too much until it’s too late.  Marketers often collect information such as job title and income level, but they do not ask subscribers for their product preferences as they prefer to send out information on all of their products to their entire subscriber base so everyone may take advantage of their offers.  This is a mistake as bigger isn’t always better.   It is essential that you maintain a preference center so you can target your subscribers with the information that is most important to them. 

It is also important to remember that list acquisition isn’t limited to your website.  In fact, studies have shown that customers are more likely to opt-in, and to share even more personal information with you, if you ask them face-to-face while handing them a paper form – especially if they just turned down a sales offer.  Asking the right questions at the right time is pure science, but it is different for every company.  You must analyze and tweak your list acquisition strategy carefully until you find the right combination of questions and timing to capture the biggest audience possible.

Finally, you need to monitor your list with a list hygiene tool that automatically corrects any misspellings, such as john@yaho.com or sam@gmail.cmo.  These tools greatly decrease the number of bounces, which impacts your overall reputation and, therefore, increases your deliverability.

Preference-based email marketing is also the key to creating relevant email messages.  Recent studies show that targeted messages that are relevant to customers may increase net profits averaging 18 times over more general broadcast communications. There are a number of things you can do to make email campaigns more relevant to the recipients, and if you have a preference center built into your list acquisition strategy, you have already accomplished the first step.

Relevant emails are messages that make the reader feel like you know them.  They are personalized with the subscribers’ names and they are customized specifically for each member of your audience with information that he or she cares about the most.  Relevant messages help build an intimate relationship with your subscribers, and the emotional bonds are the art.  For more information, read Listrak’s white papers “How to Make Your Email Campaigns More Relevant” and “Email Marketing Best Practices: Creating Relevant Email Campaigns with Dynamic Content.”