Business owners everywhere are looking at how to get their marketing exactly right and one of the greatest challenges has got to to be direct marketing emails: get them right and they fly past the junk folder, straight into the inbox and into the recipient’s consciousness. They get opened, they get read and most importantly of all, they get acted upon.
Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to get them wrong, so we take a look at four ways to avoid costly mistakes when sending marketing emails.
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Audience research
The mainstay of any marketing campaign is, of course, market research and don’t feel you can ever do too much, you really can’t. You need to know what makes your customer tick. You need to know who they are, their age, where they live and what they do for fun. You need to know the kind of content and keywords that are going to catch their attention and what will make them hit that delete button.
You need to know as much as you can and whether you’re using an account based marketing agency to help you or flying solo, it’s this groundwork that’s going to make the difference between success and failure.
Content
You won’t waste your time reading content that’s irrelevant and neither will your customer so making sure that whatever you’re producing speaks precisely to your customer is the key to success. If you’ve got your marketing research done just right, then this shouldn’t be a problem in any way.
Create content that’s sharp, engaging and on your customer’s wave length. Find out what they’re engaging with on social media and you’ll be ahead of the game.
Participation
What is it, exactly, that you’re asking the customer to do? Make this call to action very clear from the start and don’t leave your customer in any doubt what action they need to engage in. whether you want them to head to your site or complete a survey, have that button displayed prominently a few times throughout the email making it easy for your customer to follow up.
You’ll also make it clear what reward they’ll receive for completing your call, whether that’s entry to a draw or a discount offer on your goods or services.
Subject line
This is the only way you’ll make it to the opening stage of the email so make sure that you get this absolutely right. No longer than 12 words and with a headline that totally grabs the reader and reels them in.
Be smart and funny, a little salacious or plain surprising, just don’t be dull and boring.
Direct marketing is still so widely used because it works. But it only works when it’s done right so if you’re struggling to find the right formula talk to the experts about your marketing needs. You only get one chance to make a great first impression so get it right for a strategy that gets you right into the inboxes of your customers.
