5 Rules for an Effective Direct Email Marketing Campaign
While other Internet-based marketing methods such as blogging, social networking, and mobile device integration are rapidly advancing in sophistication and quality, I continue to see companies both small and large make the same direct email mistakes they were making almost a decade ago.
With the above in mind, here are five new rules for direct email marketing.
Rule #1: Don't Cram the Entire Message into the Subject Line
Typing a short story into the subject line of an email is something even my technology-inhibited grandparents are savvy enough to not do, but for some reason most companies still can't help themselves. Case in point: earlier this morning I received the latest edition of the Weekly Marketing Bulletin via email, and the subject line was this: Includes: The Top 10 Reasons Your Email Isn't Being Delivered & How to Fix it.
Rule #2: Put the Important Information in Places People Will Read It
Anyone who has taken a marketing communications workshop in the past five years understands there is a pattern to how people read email. As I recall, the order of information from top to bottom typically goes: 1) subject line, 2) email header and sub header, 3) linked text, 4) bold text, 5) anything in a bulleted list, and 6) P.S. line, if one exists. If the information you want to communicate isn't in one or more of those places, chances are no one will see it.
Rule #3: Take Advantage of the From Line
To this day, I can't figure out why so many companies refuse to use a "from" line that makes sense. Looking through my Deleted Items as I write this post, I see dozens of non-descript "from" lines such as "M L," "Info," "EXED," and "hub1"—abbreviations that are completely meaningless to me. At a minimum, using something like your company name in the "from" line will spare you from having to use it in the subject line, saving dozens of characters that can be allocated to an actual marketing message.
Rule #4: Scale Back Your Message Frequency
The act of someone joining your marketing list does NOT give you permission to pound their email boxes into submission. With direct email there is a "noise threshold" you MUST obey to prevent opt-outs—one email per three weeks for B2B, and one email per week for B2C. When it comes to message frequency, less is definitely more. Unfortunately, many people I follow on Twitter have a difficult time grasping this concept as well. In the past week I have stopped following over 30 companies because they believe posting four tweets at a time—at a rate of six times per day—is an intelligent way to drive traffic to their websites. Here's a tip: if you send me 24 messages per day, I won't read any of them. Then I'll block you.
Rule #5: Segment Your List
If all goes well, soon you will be in possession of a 20,000-piece, opt-in email list of people who actually want to hear from your company on a regular basis. When you have that list, the next challenge—demographic segmentation—is even more difficult than building the list. In a perfect world, every person on your list will have the same needs and interests. But most of us aren't this lucky. When your list becomes larger, start the segmentation process by sending subscribers a quick survey about the types of information they are interested in, giving them a small list of options to cose from. When it is time to get even more sophisticated, dig deeper into your followers' backgrounds. The key to good demographics is to customize them based on your business model and what you are trying to accomplish—not to use the same job function, title, age, and gender classifications every other company in the world uses.
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Ensuring your e mail gets read
The best way to think about your email (and by the way this works for voicemail and just about any communication tool you can think of) is to think of it like a news article that you’d find on the front page of the paper or the home page of a news site.
These contain three elements:
- The subject line is the headline. When you read news — either in print or online — how do you decide what’s worth reading, what you’ll save til later and what you don’t care about? You look at the headline. In an email that’s the subject line. There’s nothing more frustrating than looking for an email about the Johnson Project under the heading “re: great seeing you Thursday.” The subject line should tell the reader what the email is about and whether it’s worth reading. If the content changes, don’t just hit REPLY– take the time to change the subject line.
- The first paragraph is the “lead.” In a news article, the first paragraph contains the “who, what, when, where, why” — all the important information. You can quickly scan it and figure out if it’s worth further investigation. This doesn’t mean you leave out the details, it just means you don’t put them before the action item — or before telling the reader why this message is important to them. The critical information should be at the beginning of your email — preferably in the first paragraph, so people can read it in their preview pane.
- The article is edited before it’s published. Every news article goes past at least two or more sets of eyes before it’s committed to paper or the web. Why, then, do we trust that we can rattle off critical business information without even rereading it ourselves, let alone have someone else take a look at it before we hit “send”? You don’t save any time by creating an email in seconds — and then spending days apologizing for misinformation or the tone of your email. Just because you can send things at the speed of light, doesn’t mean you should. Pause and reread your email before sending it. If it’s really critical have someone else take a look at it first.
