Email Marketing Strategy Part 1 — How to make your email stand apart in an already cluttered inbox.

I have a habit of signing up for everything I find interesting online. And you know what happens when you give your email id. More than exciting content you get sales pitches. Everybody is selling something, from e-commerce sites for which everything is about sales, to bloggers who became famous by posting compelling content on their blogs.

Do you check every email you get? Or do you ignore it or mark it read without even opening it? Being bombarded with 100s of emails daily, you tend to ignore or delete the mail you don’t want to waste time in reading. And this is same with everyone. Even with your audience.

The most differentiating factor of email marketing is that it is permission-based and it divulges robust first-party data which enables a great deal of personalisation with every interaction. Also, various email marketing tools like Hubspot, Mailchimp, Aweber, AmazonSES, etc. provide a tonne of automation. From auto-scheduling to personalisations to automatic follow up emails, everything can be “programmed” using these tools.

Here are some strategy points for email marketing that will make your email stand apart in an already cluttered inbox and enable your next campaign to be a success -

1. Create a personal connection

As mentioned earlier, email allows you to have a much more personalised communication as compared to any other online channel. It enables you to create a personal connection with your audience. And it helps you to evolve your communications to match audience persona. Instead of telling them to buy from you every time you mail them, you can keep them in the loop on what’s going on and how you are making progress.

As a business, I know sales is significant, but at the same time you should understand you are selling to a human being, and human beings seek connections and don’t want to be sold to.

2. Keep it brief

Email allows you to have much more content than say an SMS, but it doesn’t mean that you should overload it with a massive amount of texts or images. Or try to put all the information in one mail. Instead, you should keep it brief with just required texts and images.

I get a lot of promotional emails with a lot of offers thrown in together without segmenting it for me. I don’t have enough patience to go through every mail in detail, rather a brief about what I am interested in is more attractive. This also allows me a scope of exploring around.

3. The sweet spot of frequency

Email signups are a golden goose for the marketers. And thus, shouldn’t be exhausted at once. If you mail your audience very frequently, they will ignore your emails or worst; they will mark your mails as spam. At the same time, don’t have a very long gap between your emails. If you mail your audience after two months, they may forget you or may not be interested in your emails anymore. Consistency is a must.

4. Get creative with retargeting

You got a user to your website, to see what you are selling, even to add some products to the cart. But then he/she got a call or a message from a friend, and the user left the cart and forgot about it. Now, you send him a mail with the details of the products he/she selected and even offered a discount to lure him/her in.

Retargeting mails work well, but not to the potential. Get a little creative with retargeting mails instead of merely putting the cart details in them. A funny line in the subject line can increase open rate by two-fold. A few more in the email will similarly increase the conversion rate.

5. Allow your audience to dump you

I know it sounds a little harsh, but allow your audience to ‘unsubscribe’ to your emails anytime they are no more interested or they don’t like the content. The end goal of email marketing is to keep your audience engaged and interested. If they don’t feel the same, there is not much you can do. However, you can put up a survey at the end of an unsubscribing process, where you can ask them the reasons for unsubscribing.

Apart from these points also try to tell your users what to expect before making them sign up. Setting an expectation of what your audience is getting into, make them sure you are not harmful and to trust you more.

This is part one of three, I am writing on email marketing strategies. If you have any queries or anything you can add, do add them in the comments or shoot me a mail on yog@11d.co