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Each time you send out an Email Marketing message, as opposed to a regular informative Email Newsletter, you run the risk of increasing the number of unsubscribes from your list. Here are some thoughts and tips to avoid annoying too many people!
- If your subscribers have been used to receiving a chatty newsletter once a month and you suddenly start bombarding them with ‘salesy’ messages every couple of days, be prepared to lose those who don’t like the sudden change.
- Don’t try to make a sale from your Email. The objective should be to get interested readers to click through to a specially prepared web page that will take over the job of selling.
- Some people will take exception to you selling anything at all – they believe you should give them everything for free. You’re better off without them on your list.
- Rather than keep sending the same marketing Emails to everyone on your list, find out who could be genuinely interested by inviting them to join a separate list. Then mail this smaller, targetted list.
- When your promotion has a genuine deadline, like a date for an event, you’ll need to send out reminder emails right up to the day itself. It’s surprising how many people ignore anything that isn’t urgent or immediate and therefore don’t book until the last moment. Interestingly reminders like this don’t seem to annoy too much.
What tips would you add?
I have to admit guys, I have never used email marketing! Despite being a mere 31, I have a little bit of an “old skool” mentality. I am a firm beliver in the pick up the phone and ask questions method. Your points make sense, but it all sounds allot of messing about.
Fundamentally the puropse of email marketing is to generate busines right? So why not cut to the chase!? Why would you send an email to direct someone to your website? How can you send a message to people without being selling involved? Also what is the response rate on email marketing? Best regards Darren
Hi Darren
Thanks for taking the time to stop by and comment on our blog. In your recruitment company, building relationships with employers as potential clients is presumably what you’re doing when you phone them. Just as you wouldn’t expect every phone call to prospective clients to result in business, sending an email that simply ‘cuts to the chase’ and says “Buy my stuff” is unlikely to have a great success rate.
Email marketing messages are part of an overall email ‘keep in touch’ strategy, but you’re right – they are sales messages, with the purpose of getting the reader interested enough to take the next step – to find out more.
Whereas in your business, you can adapt each phone conversation depending on how the call goes, an email long enough to cover every eventuality would run the risk of being deleted unread, hence the need to send interested readers to a web page which does have all that information. Then, if they like what they find on that page, the next step will be to buy or phone (or whatever the desired call to action is).
Email marketing certainly isn’t a replacement for traditional face to face networking or picking up the phone – but it is a low cost, effective way to get the message out to a large number of targeted prospects very quickly.
Response rates on email marketing is, like many marketing activites, difficult to measure accurately. You may be interested in this article from Email Insider which goes into some detail on the subject.
I hope this is helpful.