Successful email campaigns are essential to an online business environment.
In the past couple of weeks, we have expounded on the fact that, by improving the quality and the relevance of a promotional email campaign, your business may reach new levels of success.
First, you must determine the purpose and the intent associated with the promotional email campaign. Next, you must be certain to define the audience that your business is attempting to target. Then, you must determine the type of message that you will send out to your target audience. Finally, you must know what types of email campaigns exist and when to use them.
Examples include purely promotional, newsletters, and standard email. This week, we will discuss developing “the mix” to create successful email campaigns. Essentially, this means determining what type of content you will share and how often you will share.
The Content
The true underlying purpose of any email campaign is to build long-lasting relationships with potential customers and maintain the relationships that have currently been built. It is imperative to ensure that, despite the fact that you are running a promotional email campaign, that not all of your content is promotional in nature. You will want to combine editorial-based content with the promotional content to balance your messages out a bit among your subscribers.
You must determine what type of content will aid in building relationships with your current customers and what type of information will encourage prospects to become your customers. The following outlines questions that you may ask yourself that will aid in the construction of suitable content for your email marketing campaign:
- What type of information are my customers and my prospects currently seeking?
- What type of content would be read by those that I contact?
- Would my contacts respond better with certain types of content?
- Are my readers seeking information to solve specific problems?
- If my readers are in the market to solve problems, what are those problems?
- Is there urgent information that needs to be shared that is relevant to my industry?
- Would my readers appreciate casual types of greetings, such as wishes for a good day, birthday wishes, or other types of greetings pertaining to special events?
Frequency of Contact
Once you have an idea of what type of content you will share with your readers, you should then determine how often you will contact your target audience. All online marketers know and understand that there is a delicate balance between communicating too often and not communicating enough. If individuals have opted-in to your email list, they are willing to receive communication from you; however, do not overwhelm them with too much information. If you do, many will opt-out from receiving your content.
If you must blast your information in short intervals, provide a combination of promotional and informational content. No one likes to be “sold”.