The highly competent publisher of MarketingProfs, Allen Weiss, contacted us this week with a story idea. It seems that many of you want to read articles on email marketing. So, Allen wondered, could you pen something brilliant on the subject?
“Absolutely!” we said. (We like to keep Allen happy.)
In fact, in our combined years of experience, we've discovered quite a bit about what works, and what doesn't, in the email marketing arena. More than that, we've also divined the true secret of marketing via electronic mail.
Scootch up your chair and lean in close to your screen. Here's the single great truth of email marketing: It's the content that counts.
Pay the most attention to what really matters: the words in your message, and the words on any web pages the email links your customers or readers to.
Seems obvious, eh?
But unfortunately what tends to happen is that companies get swept away in their efforts to produce a visually astounding email, or a highly personalized message that, for example, addresses the recipient by her first name. The words that matter most get the short end of the stick.
As technology has advanced, there are certainly some amazing tools available to marketers. In theory, even small companies can make themselves appear larger with cleanly produced, customized, graphical, mass-market emails.
The problem comes in when companies really don't have the money to adequately clear the hurdles that come with producing a seamless, customized and beautifully designed email message. And sometimes, the hurdles can't be cleared anyway.
HTML and personalized mail requires special skills for formatting, programming and testing. A company needs to ensure that the message looks right in all possible email clients and browsers, and that the name they are using does not appear as, for example, “Dear Mr. Ann Handley” or “Dear Ms. Nick Usborne.”
Those kinds of skills are not cheap. And even if money is no object in your company (ha!), you have to be sure your clients or customers have access to HTML email readers. Some organizations automatically remove HTML mail, often without letting the intended receiver know the mail has just been censored.
The bottom line is this: The effort to produce a perfect email can take your eye off the ball that could truly hit you a home run. Yes, we're talking about the message.
With the limited marketing budgets of a post-bubble world, it makes more sense to apply those dollars elsewhere, like the copy and content your message will carry.
Here's an example of a company that excels with its email marketing copy and content:
Our good friend Jared Spool at User Interface Engineering (www.uie.com) has been writing us lately, imploring us to attend his conference this October in Boston.
Of course, he hasn't been writing us alone--his staff of two part-time conference marketing people have been sending messages to some 30,000 clients on UIE's list.
What's truly unique about UIE's email marketing efforts is that the messages come across as both personal and informative. And, Jared tells us, they have also been highly effective in pulling attendees to the October seminar--90 percent of the sign-ups thus far have come from the email list.
The messages are simple text emails. It's the copy of the email messages that really sets UIE apart. Reading the copy of the email, you know Jared is trying to entice you to spend the bucks to attend Boston this fall. But more than that, you also get a sense of Jared's quirky sense of humor; you learn about the patent his father holds; you hear about the latest industry research.
And woven through it all, you glean the competency and value of UIE's products and services.
All this comes in the way of great content. UIE's latest contains a fair amount of the sales copy--testimonials by past attendees, for example. But it's extremely well-written and compelling. Here's a snippet:
What do Microsoft, Iceland Air, the Harvard Business School, the City of Tucson, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and the American University of Cairo all have in common?
People from these very companies, hospitals, government agencies, and universities have all picked up on the benefits of attending User Interface 7 East. (You can get program details at https://www.uiconf.com)
Why should you join them at User Interface 7 East? Rather than tell you what *we* think the benefits are, we've asked past conference attendees what they valued most about their experiences.
The latest email message also gives a meaty list of sites that do community work.
One previous to that gives us an in-depth interview with Peter Merholz, expert information architect and founder of Adaptive Path, about how they helped redesign three of PeopleSoft's sites. It's a great chat, chock-full of information. And--guess what? Merholz is also speaking at the October conference.
Jared explains the marketing campaign as intentionally content-driven. “Our audience is extremely hungry for our content, particularly since their livelihood now depends on it,” Jared said. Presentation of the email message--either with personalization or full-blown HTML--“is far second to useful information.”
Isn't that a message we all should hear?
