So you’ve written that darned e-newsletter that’s been on your to-do list for weeks, struggled with what to talk about, wrestled with photos and links, remembered that you should link it to your website and then had the gloomy realization that you’ve not updated the site for months so you’ll have to do it now or your newsletter will be sending readers to an out of date site.
Then you send it out and wait in anticipation for an hour or two, while you get all the bounced/wrong email addresses back in your inbox. Then you look at the statistics and find that only 2% even bothered to open it and no-one clicked on any links. Unsurprisingly it doesn’t achieve anything but you’ll do it all again in a few weeks when you can’t put it off any longer. Sound familiar?
You’re not alone.
This scene is played out in businesses across the world every day. And yet it could be so simple. It could even be fun! This is email marketing from a marketer’s perspective. It’s good – you should read it!
- Understand what you want from your e-marketing.Why are you even sending out e-newsletters in the first place? Ideally you’ll have a marketing strategy that outlines who you’re trying to reach, what you’re offering them, what messages you’re going to use and when you’re going to send them. Realistically many firms don’t have anything as detailed as this but you will probably have a good idea of who your target customer is.If you DON’T then don’t waste your time sending out an e-newsletter as it will be a waste of time and effort – better to spend your time getting the basics right so that your marketing is focused on the right people going forward. Also what are you expecting from your e-newsletter? More visitors to your website? More Facebook ‘likes’? Some direct sales? More phone enquiries? Be clear about what you want readers to do, and make it easy for them to do it.
- Make sure that your ‘offer’ fits your target group.If you know who you’re trying to reach (is it local cleaning businesses? Mums with children of school age? One man band consultants?) then think about what will resonate with them. Whatever you’re trying to sell them needs to solve a problem, meet a need or add value – if it doesn’t do any of those things then you’ll probably not sell a whole lot. If you’re not sure why a certain group buys but you just know it does, then ask some of them. People are usually really happy to tell you why they buy something and sometimes the answers are a complete surprise – you’ll learn a lot and probably build some stronger relationships in the process.
- Make it REAL for them.If you’re offering something relevant to them then tell them WHY it solves a problem, meets a need or adds value. Don’t expect them to work it out for themselves. DON’T SELL THEM WHAT THEY NEED, SELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT. If you’re selling insurance to consultants, they might not take any notice of something telling them why all consultants need to have insurance and how good your product is. If, however, you tell them that a consultant in the news (if you can find one) was recently sued for XX because of a bad piece of work, and that he lost his house – do you think they would take notice?
- It’s about THEM not YOU.Even though it’s called an e-newsletter, really people aren’t that interested in your news. I’m sorry to break this to you but why would they read through 6 articles about how great you are? They want to know what you can do for them. You need to understand their issues and tackle them. If you are talking to children’s nurseries then reference issues that mean something to them – such as OFSTED inspections, intakes, staff ratios or whatever is relevant to what you’re selling. Find a way to show that you understand them and that you can help them.
- Segment and Tailor.While we’re on the subject of children’s nurseries, you wouldn’t send them the same email as you would send a plant nursery owner, a teacher or a hypnotherapist. So why do so many businesses spend time writing their e-newsletter (all about them) and simply send it to their entire database?Just imagine how much more interest you would generate from a hypnotherapist if you showed why your product or service is perfectly suited to therapists and coaches. Maybe you even create a special product for them – it can be your standard product but renamed and with the description tailored to that type of business. Where you can, include references to any topical items in their ‘world’ – statistics that have been published, news stories, case studies – anything that helps you be more relevant.
- Make it interactive.Once you understand who you’re talking to and what you’re saying, it should be fairly easy to write your e-newsletter content. Remember in point 1 when we talked about what you want readers to do? Well now is the time to put it into action.Do you want them to visit your website? If so, just put an opening paragraph in the e-newsletter and then put a ‘read more…’ link that takes them through to your blog or website where the rest of the article is hosted.Do you want them to like your Facebook Page? Well put a big button on there saying ‘Like our Facebook Page’ and have it open up your Facebook page in a window so they can act on it immediately. Even better, give them an incentive to do it – run a competition or give a discount code which is only available for Facebook fans and make that clear in the e-newsletter.
If you sell products and you want them to buy direct from the e-newsletter then again tell the readers why they need to buy your product right now (with the right offer and tailored message) and put a big offer box in the newsletter with a limited offer – offer only valid till midnight tomorrow, only available to the first 10 people, think of a version that will work for your business.
- More helpful information, less sales!Structure your e-newsletters in such a way that you prove your worth, validity and credibility to your recipients BEFORE you start trying to sell them anything. Give them helpful information, review books or products, cover some common Q&As, highlight a relevant news story (I saw this and thought of you!) or share some top tips without expecting anything in return.You’re building a relationship with your readers and showing them that it’s worth keeping your emails rather than hitting delete. You can still showcase or sell products or services but in context and this element should only be 10-20% of the email rather than 90-100%. You can always send out occasional ‘offer’ newsletters that are purely sales focused but don’t let these be the only e-newsletters you send.
- Time it Right.You finish your e-newsletter and press send, right? No! There are various statistics showing when the best time is to send out e-newsletters but it all depends on who you’re sending them to. The best way to find out is to send them out in batches, at different times and on different days, and see which combination achieves the best results in terms of opens and clicks. You’ll then find the optimum time/day for each of your target sectors and you can plan your newsletter schedule around that.
- Looks aren’t everything.Of course you want your e-newsletter to be a thing of beauty but the content is the most import element. If it looks beautiful but the pictures don’t load, or the content is dreadful then you may as well not bother! All of the mainstream email newsletter packages such as mailchimp, icontact, constant contact and the like, have free templates included for you to adapt. You can pick a layout, change the colour scheme to suit you and upload your logo – that will be fine, don’t agonise over it for days. Just get it written and out there (at the right time for you) because you’ll achieve better results from a well written and well-presented e-newsletter than from a gorgeous, designer super dooper flashy e-newsletter that never gets sent.
- Use the stats.All of the email newsletter packages we mentioned above have built-in statistics packages showing how many e-newsletters you sent, how many bounced (went to email addresses that were wrong or out of use), how many were opened, how many people clicked on links and which links they clicked on, how many people forwarded to a friend and how many unsubscribed.This is really useful information because if you know that a particularly email got a much higher open rate than usual, or a particular link made lots of people click on it then work out why that was and replicate it. By the same token if a particular e-newsletter caused a high number of recipients to unsubscribe then again, work out why. Something was either really unpopular or really irrelevant so try to avoid repeating that mistake.
Little extra tips for good measure…
- You MUST include an unsubscribe button to allow people to take themselves off your list and you MUST take them off the list! It’s their right to unsubscribe – don’t take it personally, you’re just not right for them at the moment.
- If you’re using old, out of date lists, lists that you’ve bought or lists that you’ve ‘scraped’ from the internet you’ll probably get a high rate of unsubscribes. If this happens then your email provider might block your account.
- Some email providers won’t even let you use ‘role based’ email addresses like sales@, admin@, enquiries@ so if your lists have lots of these types of addresses you won’t be able to use them.
We hope you found our 10 top tips on email marketing useful – we’ll have more top tips every week for the next few weeks to get you up to speed on the key marketing tools. Please share this with your friends and colleagues if you think they would be interested. We also have an e-newsletter ourselves that goes out from 19 Marketing and you can sign up on our front page
Author: Claire Mitchell, MD 19 Marketing Ltd.
©Copyright 19 Marketing Ltd
Advertisement
