Defining Insights - Featured Story

Are you there, Web 2.0? It’s Me, Email...

Remember the days when email was cool? In the days of Web 2.0, online communities, twittering, and widgets, a lot of people seem to have forgotten about our dear old friend, the email. Everyone wants to talk about how many times their zombie beat up your vampire on Facebook, and who in the office has the most friends on MySpace (they aren’t really your friends, you know?). Email continues to be a tried and true vehicle to deliver genuine, quantifiable, and measurable results for your business.

What has changed about email marketing? What learnings can we gleam from the era of social media to make our email more effective?

First, remember that email IS actually a dialogue. Most marketers still spend too much time talking with email and not enough time listening. They are not paying attention to how their users interact and react to the medium. Nor do they take advantage of the technological advances allowing for highly personalized, targeted emails.

The second thing to remember is to engage your readers. Great, someone opted-in to receive your emails, but are you giving them a reason to continue to read them?

Many consider email to be a highly transactional tool designed primarily for retention. The reality is email is a great mechanism to keep customers and prospects engaged with your brand for a long period of time. So, how do you cut through the inbox clutter? This begins our quest for the perfect email.

No matter what type of email marketing you are doing, promotional emails, transactional emails, basic newsletters, or a combination; the perfect email has the following basic criteria:

Relevancy – If you are sending an email, you should know SOMETHING about the recipient. What they signed up for, when they signed up, why did they want to hear from you in the first place. Make sure your email doesn’t violate the first rule which is providing something that your user asked for in the first place. Also, make sure you are learning about your visitors’ preferences over time and continue to focus your messages accordingly. The more segmented and targeted your message, the more likely your list will continue to stay engaged.

Timely – I have been asked numerous times, “When is the best time to send an email.” The answer they are looking for is something like, “2:37pm on every other Tuesday.” Unfortunately, the real answer is, “It depends.” It depends on why you are sending the email in the first place, what is your objective, and what are you trying to achieve? A homebuilder wanting to drive foot traffic to the grand opening of a new community should be looking at a different date and time than hotel promoting last minute vacation package deals.

Well-rendered – OK, admittedly the least sexy part of email marketing but still very important. Email is one of the more flexible channels for the end user. Between the multitude of personalization options contained in Outlook, to the continual advancement and release of mobile options for viewing email, understanding how an email will be displayed in the various email clients is critical. Knowing how YOUR audience is viewing YOUR emails can help a lot. Make sure that the email is as engaging as possible to the audience viewing it in all its splendor, but still effective to the person viewing it on his or her Blackberry (We don’t all have our new iPhones yet). Develop emails with both best case and worst case scenarios in mind.

Value-adding: Put yourself in your recipient’s shoes. Is the email that you are sending truly adding some value to your customer’s life? Is it giving them what they want or need when they want or need it? Have you really created something that a normal person would find useful? Make sure your email passes that test. Don’t waste your list’s time by sending emails that are useful to you, but worthless to the recipient.

No, talking about email is not quite as entertaining as discussing the latest viral strategy utilizing Flickr, Facebook, and Flock. However, if you are looking for a proven method to engage your customers and prospects in a real dialogue with a high amount of ROI and quantifiable impact to the bottom line, email still knows how to make all those social applications green with envy.