What are the keys for a successful direct email message?
A successful email marketing campaign is possible when you understand what email is all about. Contrary to popular belief email marketing is not a clone of direct mail, or even its cousin. Direct email is a unique communication method, which provides an opportunity to send a targeted message to prospects that request more information. A highly focused email message offers incentives to purchase products and services and also serves to pre-qualify prospects’ interests by driving them to the website.
Email is not designed to replace on-site product presentations or to provide a means to overwhelm the customer/prospect with tons of information. While these principles may sound obvious they are easily misunderstood and lead to common mistakes.
Take a look at what happened to Eric’s first email campaign. Eric, who is an independent representative for a bottle manufacturer recently launched his email campaign based on leads that came in from his website.
In Eric’s email he included what some prospects likened to everything, but the kitchen sink. In hindsight, he went overboard. At the time, the idea of including a wide range of products and purchasing information made sense. In the past he made many sales from a detailed product presentation. While this maybe true in his line of work as an outside sales representative, it’s not applicable in email marketing.
What are the hallmarks of an effective email marketing piece?
Be direct and to the point. Don’t send an information dump like Eric did. It’s more productive and results driven when email messages are tightly focused. Target content around your customers’ interests and needs and keep it brief.
Some people get hundreds of emails a day and perhaps a dozen that they actually want to read. In those few seconds when a person is scanning an email they need to be able to tell at a quick glance if they should read on or hit the delete key. If you give them too much information its easier to hit the delete key.
Follow the email marketing creed.
Be informative, timely and relevant in your pitch. Remember, email communication is a soft sale value based approach. You don’t need to feel the pressure to close the deal in the first email. This form of communication develops relationships over time. There’s no need to do like Eric did and say everything in one email. They’ll be many more chances to communicate.
Keep it personal
We’ve all received our share of direct mail labeled “dear friend”. If they truly were our friend they’d call us by our name. Our natural instinct is to throw away any message with such an approach. When sending an email message it’s best to know the name of your contacts. If you don’t, then add a simple hi or hello in the greeting.
Command action
Get email recipients to come back to the website for more information and to place orders. You do this by placing several links within the email. In traditional marketing this is what’s known as a call to action. These links can be anywhere in the body of the email. However, when people scan something they often move in a z as they glance at the top, middle and bottom text.
Provide incentives with links to your website designed to cause the prospect to act quickly. For instance, offer promotional incentives like coupons, freebies, two for one deals, and contests, which are only available if they “act now”. Make these enticements date sensitive and available for a limited time.
Additional factors for success
The success of an email message depends on one very important fact; the intended recipient requested information from you. When you send email messages to interested parties, it’s what’s known as permission based marketing. You are in theory sending a message to a welcome audience. This person wants what you have to say. It’s why they signed up via a website or email prompt asking for more information. Now it’s up to you to deliver the goods.
