Email Marketing

Personalization is the king

When it comes to proper Email Marketing, keep in mind that the personalization is the king. Around the world, companies, for various reasons (like budget optimization), they treat all their customers the same, addressing with the same message, same offer, same deal and when the line is traced and profit is accounted, the results not looking good, with all that budget optimization b.s.

To use Email Marketing properly, prepare yourself to really meet your customers. Address them with the proper message, the proper deal, the proper everything, including calling them by their name. Imagine you are in a supermarket to buy some groceries and you remembered that you run out of toothpaste and you head for the correct department to buy what you need. Like you, every individual from that supermarket, is looking for products matching their individual needs. Now imagine that, if you go to the department when you expect to find toothpaste but after you manage to make your way, you discover that there is no products at all of what you need and that supermarket only advertise, promotes and sells just one particular product and it’s nothing like toothpaste at all. Well, it’s very bizarre example but that is just the same as with your customers.

Don’t treat everyone as one individual with a single need even though you might sell only one product. In such case, some customers might have low funds and a coupon deal will work just fine while others might want just more reasons to buy your product, no matter the discount your voucher is featuring.

If you go to Russia, you can speak English and manage to make your way through to get a good hotel, eat on a fancy restaurant but what if you plan to move there for a little longer period, imagine you speak the language every person born there speaks, you see already how far you can go.

It’s almost known to every serious email marketing provider that most of the retailers among with so called top marketers, are all making a critical error when they plan and execute an email marketing campaign: they know simply nothing about their customers. All what they think is they got a task to create, deliver and report back with the email marketing campaign. They only focus on executing the task and at this point is when they should start considering doing things different, things like: splitting the list into different lists based on certain criteria like: buyers behavior and buying power for that certain product, lifestyle, demographics, age or any other criteria you have available. Once done, you have the power to target and direct your message directly to the indicated profiles to maximize the return on your investment (time and cost).

A successful Email Marketing campaign should also incorporate an eye-catching design. Every email marketer has tools nowadays like eye-tracking software and I don’t get in details on the advantage that the companies using such software are gaining if they put everything in place and make real use of it.

By using all the data provided by an eye-tracking software, you will be able to see things from your buyers/customers perspective and not just from your own point of view, when you know the campaign since you created everything but you act frustrated as your customers seem not to “speak the same language like you”. Identifying the so-called “hot-spots”, places where your customers are focusing their attention and their actions, you will be able to measure your success rate or change the layout to maximize the results and improve the performance.

Did you know?  …that most of your customers are reading your message in a preview pane before opening your message properly. It’s highly advised you design your message and your offers to display properly on a preview pane and at the same time be very appealing to make the customer see even more. Please your most important offer or offers – always – at the top of your message, but don’t make the mistake to include them all in the header image as all the studies in this field shows customers are frequently reading their messages with email programs that are blocking images by default and the same studies shows that they rarely or sometimes will never download the images an HTML email campaign will include.

One more critical error, email marketers are making is to confuse the print campaign that run simultaneously with the email campaign, so while on the print campaign the long copy is working like crazy with email marketing is a different story, here is where you need to keep your message and your offer short, concise and straight to the point. Don’t full around with your customers, they will ultimately “divorce” you by unsubscribing from your list and this is – believe me – the last thing you want to happen to your campaign.

Using call to action and trigger words to tell your reader it’s very important to act right at that very given moment and no later on or day after. Make your offers and promotions in bold and clickable and place them on top of your creative design.

Very critical is also the part where – again everyone  – is ignoring and make the From field something vague, better use your company name than something general like james@yourcompany.com or use the name your customers are used with, and this can be even the name of your cashier or the sales person.

Now, just now, after you made a clear verification for everything and you feel ready then only now you can start testing.

The great thing about testing is that you can measure everything and every interaction can be monitored for the success rate or like I like to say, the return on your investment. Lucky, the great, very fabulous thing – about email marketing is that you can track and monitor the results fairly simple.