Since I started to focus more on email marketing, I have been reading a lot of articles, more or less professional, about the importance of sending a newsletter: how to write it, what topics to cover, regularity of sending, open rates and other recommendations (some that sound like magic potions too) to make our readers read a lot of content.
Most of the articles, you may have read them too, talk about how email marketing is all about sending content produced with the aim of creating an epistolary relationship with readers that, all too often, we do not even know. Most of the time, it does not even matter if we know them or not because we plan to stun them with facts and news that interest them very little. The important thing seems to be just getting into the inbox and getting open.
Email marketing is much more than a generic newsletter.
An email message is not a megaphone like in social media: it is a personal and targeted way, valuable for our business, that helps us achieve our goals. Objectives may be different: for example, relational but also commercial or purely informative, written with different content in mind than purely conversational.
In this article, I put together some of the brands that delight me with their purely promotional messages, and which I can hardly resist the temptation to buy.
For example, the T-shirts from The Bee & The Fox:
Other businesses do a wonderful job with their order completion messages (transactional messages), which let’s face it, are the messages we wait for the most!
Not to mention some of my favourite emails, the welcome emails that arrive when we sign up to a new mailing list. And yes, I love to sleep so a good mattress is intriguing to me.
As you can see, there are many types of messages, so do not be put off by some newsletters you sometimes receive. In fact, I will give you a piece of advice: start cleaning up your inbox from the people you do not want to read anymore. You will be doing yourself, and the writer, a favour, believe me.*or read below.
Start by planning some quality work:
- Set about subject lines that get opened, get read and lead to action;
- Do not focus exclusively on content that has to be substantial or relational, this can be a small part of your work if your business or resources require it;
- Build a strategy based on the objectives you have to achieve and not on the amount of text you have to write.
- Remember to balance effort and results and, above all, keep in mind that your value is not based on the number of times you send a message but on the total of your actions, offline and online. Your talent is based on your overall strategy, your ability to communicate with the right people, and your ability to experiment and care about the needs of others. It is all that you should focus on, the others, if you think about it: those who believe in you and trust you, those who buy and recommend you.
- Human beings are often unpredictable (hence the importance of experimenting and adjusting your pitch) and ultra-stimulated. Being able to tickle their attention within their buying decision path with a nice, relevant and personal message can be the key to establishing that lasting relationship that brings your world closer to theirs.
Have you already started sending emails to your customers and readers? If you have not yet and would like to have a chat with me, book a free call here so we can see together if email marketing is right for you.
Talk soon,
Chiara
*If engagement with a newsletter is low, it can happen that the emails start to end up in the receiver’s spam folder. This penalises the deliverability: the emails start to be seen as suspicious by the mail client that decides to not deliver the message to the inbox any longer. The ‘poor’ content creator may end up being marked as spam, for this and other reasons. Since a drop in the level of interest in a topic can also be physiological, do yourself and the sender a favour and unsubscribe from the mailing list.
