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Robin Houghton
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From the Eggblogg... |
| Are we losing the ability to write, and do we care? |
Ooh, there I go again. And here's me starting a sentence with 'and'.
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Things we've read... |
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The dirty little secret of ESPs |
Some of the big name email service providers are turning a blind eye to spammers. It's all down to money, apparently. Why am I not surprised?
From the Email Experience Council.
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Has digital killed off direct mail?
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From Marketing Week.
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Gabe and Max's Internet Thing
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Just for laughs. The characters are definitely fictitious ...
View the video...
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How relevance drives email marketing success
It's no secret that people will open and read commercial emails if they are relevant to them.
Think of a time when you received an email which you opened, read and were glad you had. Maybe the subject matter interested you, solved a problem for you or made you laugh. Or perhaps it featured a product or service that you'd had your eye on for a while.
Sometimes it's simply good timing. Last week you weren’t interested in buying summer clothing but this week you’ve just booked a beach holiday and you’re in the mood to buy.
What I’m talking about is timing and targeting. They are two of the four essentials of email marketing, but they tend to get less attention than the more exciting bits, the creative and the offer. Just think about it though: you can produce the slickest looking email campaign with a killer offer, and it may well be irresistible. But if it gets sent to people who find it irrelevant, then it's useless.
So the questions to ask are:
1) Are we targeting people who will find our emails relevant? (Hint: this is not necessarily the same as 'past customers', or 'everyone on our mailing list'). Plus, I think this is a more useful way of looking at it than 'How do we make our emails more relevant?'
2) Is this the right time to be emailing? (Although we can’t know everything that's going on in people's lives we should have some insights into our customers' behaviour and buying habits, as well as knowledge of the seasons, holidays, national events and so forth. These should not be ignored at the expense of 'getting something out'.)
Good timing is down to strategic forward planning and testing, good targeting means segmenting your database in a meaningful way. More on both in future eTips.
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