Are people fed up with my Email Campaigns

OK so you’re planning your next few email campaigns and a little voice at the back of your head says ‘are people getting fed up receiving promotional emails?’ It’s a good question and the answer is two-fold. Let me explain…

You get emails through – are you fed up with them? The chances are that just as you get fed up with an update from your mobile network or newsletter from the company you leased your car from, an email comes through from lastminute with a fabulous offer on a 2 day break to Prague, or a special offer from your favourite online store on that item you wanted. And then the car leasing company sends an offer through in 3 months time when your car is up for renewal and the latest Mercedes C Class offer is amazing! The point is, people are fed up receiving things they don’t want to receive, and that could even be a timing element – like the car leasing example.

So how do we work around this – do we need to become mind-readers? Should we email less or stop? The answers are simple and easy to implement. It is just a case of not forgetting the direct marketing element of email marketing. Understanding and tailoring to individual customer needs. This is where data, segmentation and automation come into their own. See the example below…

I have an online book store and send out a selection of my latest titles, special offers etc. every month. I get little response, unsubscribes, non-openers and my base drops every time. How do I re-engage my audience and drive sales opportunities?

• 1. Use the data I have to understand my customers. Sales data and behavioural data from past campaigns will generate their areas of interest. I could even use a preference centre on sign-up or send out a survey to capture the data. A good example would be genre of book. Mary likes romance and comedy but not sci-fi, James likes Horror and Sci-fi and so on. Now I know what my customers like and want to buy.
• 2. Put the genre data alongside my customers in my database allowing me to promote to them based on what they want to see. Rather than sending an email with 30 books of mixed genre, where only 2 are appropriate to the person and none of those are in the special offer category, I can send each customer email campaigns where every book relates to the genres they enjoy – even the special offers!
• 3. Using dynamically adjusted content based on a genre rule, design a template that populates the same email campaign differently, dependant on that individuals tastes.

Done – open rates up, enagement levels and interaction up and sales up.

So the answer to the fed up question? Not if they want them, and it’s your job to make sure they do and continue to. And if all that seems like hard work, give us a call and discuss automatic population of dynamically altered content from data and website exports – tailor your next email campaigns without doing anything more than populating your site.