Email marketing is dead right?
Some people think GDPR put the final nail in the coffin when it came to the benefits of email marketing for lead generation. We have seen our email inboxes become streamlined and fill up with things that are now relevant to what we want right?
Not necessarily. What GDPR has done is make companies only market to us if we are interested. And by doing so, they have increased the autonomy and ferocity of the emails that come through. How many times have you left an item in the cart at the checkout and then gotten emailed to remind you to check out? Or if you are doing app-based shopping, you get a notification coming up to remind you to check back in.
We are still being emailed offers, time-sensitive discount codes, information on products we may have been interested in in the past and seasonal emails which get lost in all the others.
No amount of ‘clever’ subject lines or click-bait style subjects can compete with the amount of noise that is in your inbox. All of which ends in people deleting and unsubscribing resulting in companies seeing their open rate plummet.
The only way is UX
But we’re forgetting the key element that gets people opening in the first place:
Customer Experience
We make a big song and dance about user experience when it comes website design; indeed, Google are now actively ranking websites high if they make the user happy. So how can we encourage openings every time an email comes into someone’s inbox?
Simple. Be what they want you to be – delight your email list. Obviously this isn’t going to happen overnight. You need to build up trust with your audience, and this is done through consistency. A regular email builds your brand and engages your audience (even if they don’t open the email in the first instance) on a regular basis. There is no magic number of frequency. That will depend on your business and what you have to talk about. We have worked on campaigns that use daily emails; we’ve also worked on campaigns that are seasonal.
At Cariad Marketing we focus on our expertise. We are very good at what we do and we get results, but we are also a friendly bunch and have fun in the office and want to let the world know this. So what better way to do this than via email?
The content doesn’t need to be long (who has time to read long emails?) or full of industry facts. Write short pieces of news with calls to actions linking them to your website if your audience wants to read more.
Ultimately you want to make sure that your audience is keen to know more about you and the services you offer. Because that’s what you are good at right?
For pointers on how to build an effective strategy, please get in touch.
