Lauren Ackerman, Web Content Specialist
Have you ever been stuck in a conversation with someone who blathered on, never asked about your interests or paused at what would be a natural lull in conversation? The vast majority of email marketing is like that.
In a face-to-face conversation, we look for conversational cues to gauge the interest of the person we were speaking to. Lack of eye contact, awkward pauses, drifting attention are all cues that would tell us that it’s time to change the subject, or even end the conversation and move on. Believe it or not, in the digital world, there are equivalent cues that we should be paying attention to.
- “Do they want to talk to me?”
Use your open and click Rates to determine how frequently people want to engage you. Create segmentation based on these metrics and put the most active segments on every blast: weekly, daily, and monthly.
Test different frequencies for the less active segments: try emailing them once a month, or once every-other send.
- “What are you interested in?”
Email volume increased by 25% this holiday season, but engagement rates did not decrease as we’d traditionally expect to see when we market to a broader audience. Which means email marketers have begun to understand something: This is not a one-way conversation.
Savvy marketers are taking care to craft conversations around products, categories and price points their customers have interacted with in the past. Do some investigating. Match your transactional file against your email database, and identify customer groups based on brands they like, categories they’ve purchased, price points and create special email launches for those groups.
- “It’s time to change the subject.”
Every email is an opportunity to learn what content your audience finds valuable. As a channel, email is heavily driven by promotions, but if that’s the only type of email you’re sending you’re missing out on some testing and relationship building opportunities.
Do some relationship building with some helpful how-to editorial content. Mix in video content and watch your engagement metrics to gauge their popularity. Sometimes, to truly capture the interest of your audience you have to think out-of-the-box. A great conversationalist, whether online or in person, is always is in the center of attention telling a captivating, one of a kind story. Look for those opportunities to find your brands unique story and share it.
To stalwart non-openers, craft a re-engagement series with messaging that says loudly and clearly “We miss you!” to see if you can move to entice some of those disengaged customers into opening an email. In fact, maybe they’re a tactile bunch that would respond better to a direct mail piece.
The principle couldn’t be simpler: Spend more time talking to your best customers.
Make an effort to find out their interests and deliver content to them that aligns with those interests. And finally, know when it’s time to change it up, or test those names in another channel. At the end of the day, it’s about getting the right message to the right people, and not shouting to a disinterested crowd.
Tags: Content, email marketing