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Current Trends In Email Marketing - Page 6 of 6
A Hunter and Associates Review -
November 2002
1-SUMMARY
| 2-SPAM | 3-COMMERCE
| 4-PERMISSION EMAIL
5-WHAT PEOPLE THINK | 6-HOW
TO DO IT
HOW TO DO IT
The key to sending organized email is that it should feel
as if it were being sent as a true reply to your recipient, rather than pushed
out by your initiative. You should have so respectful a relationship with your
recipients that if their spam filters happened to delete you they would move you
to a better email address in order to continue to receive your emails.
Your email, in other words, should be welcome, or why would
you risk your good name and your existing relationships to alienate people? In
the boom times that are already underway, there will be times when the best way
you can provide service to your users is to stay out of their inboxes. Beware
of looking like bulk mail, and if in doubt, don't do it. Remember that the user's
Unsubscribe is usually silent, and often forever.
But most organizations won't have to look far to find a
real need to use email. Perhaps an organization has a newsletter that it would
like to offer to its users through email for convenience or to cut costs; or a
construction project wants to involve the local community in progress reports;
or press releases normally lost to industry specialists could also be of interest
to certain larger groups; or a major enhancement in the website or the shipping
department or the pricing structure is about to occur; or an event or a seminar
or a meeting or a fundraiser needs to be announced as broadly as relevant.
Ways to get started
The best way to start is outside of email: do not offer
your first solicitation in email. And if you already send a regular email, be
very careful how you include any new or divergent offering in that email: people
will subscribe lovingly for years to an information newsletter, and ditch it immediately
at the first sign of ulterior motive.
If possible or appropriate, you may decide to phone all
your targets individually to ask them if they'd like to receive your email announcement.
You may not have their email addresses, you may have to send them postal mail
to get them to the website to give you their email addresses. You might sign them
up gradually over time in the course of your routine dealings with them.
Marketing determines the best way to reach your target
in the first instance. Marketing also must create an inducement of some kind:
your obligation is to add value to the relationship in some way. Your only objective
is to deepen your relationships (you will find ways to benefit from that enhanced
relationship).
Swappable collaterals
You should develop fluent exchanges between your website,
your printed materials, your phone communication, your trade shows, seminars,
and other person to person meetings, and your email broadcasts and narrowcasts.
Review internal company procedures so that different departments don't end up
dealing differently with the same people through different media.
Beware of HTML
In creating emails, begin with text-only format. If you
move to HTML format, only do it at the specific election of the recipient. The
advantage of rich-media email is that you can bring the website to the email,
which in a trusting relationship is arguably more convenient for the user than
to use the email to take the user to the website (through a simple link).
Beware that the majority (90%) of HTML emails operate dysfunctionally
in Lotus Notes and in AOL (77 million combined users), and in several other email
programs, according to studies made by Silverpop Systems. It's the old Web developer's
headache of having to build different varieties of a website for different browsers,
all over again with email, and awareness of this new headache is not widespread
yet.
Mirror the mail in the website
Unless you really know what you're doing, you would be
better off investing modestly in some more personalization scripting for your
website, and putting your inducement or valuable item on the website, and sending
a very simple email linking to it. Carry this offer through to all your other
media, and make sure that your offer or brand carries immediate recognition through
the different media (co-ordinate your different designers and vendors to achieve
this).
Eventually, when you have a repeat pattern established,
you can ask your users if they'd like to receive the web content directly in email.
You might perhaps also develop ways to send people from the website to a postal
mail communication, for example, and make sure that value is added somehow by
doing this.
Don't broadcast
If you are sending out announcements, note that one study
has already shown that response to email is much less when recipients can perceive
the email has been sent to many others. Legitimate announcements to the mass ("server
upgrade next Wednesday", "Friday's class is canceled", etc.) are
fine, but don't mix a call to action in such a broadcast email. For a call to
action, craft a perfectly individualized email.
Request feedback from your recipients: should you make
the email longer, go into more detail here or on the website, should you use HTML,
do they agree with your last message, should you publish their feedback, would
they like you to start a discussion forum, and so on.
Above all remember that "they" are "we"
- we all use email to enhance our lives. As the Pew Internet & American Life
studies show so well, email is serious now. We use it for serious communications,
about births, and deaths, and real life, we use it to talk with our mothers, and
increasingly to talk to our political representatives. We ourselves have immensely
greater individual reach through email and the Web. We are reaching out also to
commerce, and we welcome the reciprocal reaching back, so long as it's done just
so.
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