If you want to triple your email results without jeopardizing your list, I’ve got a strategy to share with you. I know this works, because we do it ourselves; we send more emails and get fewer opt-outs while increasing our sender reputation. I am convinced that you can get the same results with our method, and I’ll explain why.
And no, I didn’t just place a “For Sale†sign on a bridge in Brooklyn. There’s a common fallacy in email marketing that says if you send frequently to your list, your leads will become annoyed and your reputation will be affected. What’s worse, the prospect of your email being marked as spam is a lingering fear. This fallacy is given credence by batch-and-blasters who create one main message and then send it to everyone on the list.
One of the issues is that batch-and-blast marketers are list-centric, so yes, they’re generalists who do not take into account each person’s unique interests. The word “list†should reflect a unique set of characteristics of the people on these “lists.†(For example, I get daily emails from marketing automation companies asking if we would be interested in trying out their platform, oblivious that I‘m employed by a marketing automation company.) Could it get anymore batch and blast than that?
I’d like you to consider two aspects of marketing that are all about connecting with your customers’ unique interests and needs - not just blindly sending out messages that do not engage the people on your list. A message has to be relevant. After all, communication is about connecting – to prove that you have an understanding of your customer base. What causes people to react to emails in the first place? That’s exactly my point.
Segmentation
In a past post, Genoo President Kim Albee talked about how “old school†marketing instructs you to segment based on one aspect. Doing that might have some relevance, but this type of segmentation doesn’t necessarily yield engagement with great results. It requires much more.
If you segment correctly and your content focuses on that segment, the send frequency of emails becomes inconsequential, and you can even send a daily email to your lists without any complaints or repercussions. Here’s one example why:
As an experiment, Kim sent an email to her whole list requesting if they would be open to receiving an email every day for 30 days on the subject of marketing and business. The response to her request was a revelation. She assumed that approximately 15 people would opt in to her request, but to her amazement, 250 people subscribed and three new leads opted in as well - who had apparently had Kim’s original email shared with them.
Based on the experiment’s rules, Kim couldn’t pre-write any emails - they had to be written on the day that they were sent.
It was a challenge for Kim, too, but she turned into a writing machine, missing only one day due to a prior commitment in California for 12 hours of meetings. She was too exhausted to write that evening at her hotel.
After the experiment ended, Kim sent a survey to those who had opted in for the 30-day email marathon. The survey had one question asking if they thought they had received too many emails. To her surprise, NO ONE said yes to that question! They did, however, mention that if the emails were relevant to them, they would be open to getting emails every day.
What a marvelous insight, and we see that it is true to this day, and even truer as our email inboxes overflow. People want communication to mean something to them, and that’s when it is acceptable.
Sending an email to your entire list makes it really difficult to be relevant to the majority on that list, because it may be too general and doesn’t target particular interests. Therefore, the ONLY way to do this in today’s environment is to implement a segmenting strategy and then automate that segmentation by applying it your leads. Taking the time to send an email specific to what your subscribers find relevant leads to better engagement - this is the key to better communication with results you want.
They Will Click if it’s Relevant to Them
The benefits to sending a few extra relevant emails (opens, clicks, conversions etc.) almost always outweigh the short-term losses (unsubscribes, spam complaints). In a highly competitive world, the quest for inbox supremacy is also at an all-time high, so your email content must benefit them in some way or else you’ll suffer the consequences.
Many marketers are careful about email sending frequency, but they are missing the point. This conservative approach can have more negative effects than sending emails too often. When you can be relevant to your leads’ interests, sending emails more frequently can counteract these challenges effectively:
• Reduced visibility leaves you lost in the crowd: Even if your emails stay in the inbox unopened, there is a positive element of positioning your brand in the customer’s mind.
• Damaging sender reputation when you batch and blast: Inconsistent or infrequent mailing can sound the alarm with many email service providers, similar to how sending frequent emails that don’t resonate with a huge majority of the recipients will damage your reputation.
• Subscribers will forget about you: Most people sign up for a reason, and if you don’t email enough, you will be forgotten.
As marketers, we have a lot of responsibilities to be good communicators, and sometimes, getting stuck in a rut and not looking at innovative ways to communicate can be detrimental. We tend to be creatures of habit or become obsessed with following general guidelines or falling into a trap of believing myths about email marketing. That’s when a call to investigate and innovate should occur - it will set you apart from everyone.
When people are not getting results with email marketing, one of the first things we look at is how they are segmenting. Are your email messages relevant to the person or people you are sending them to? That is where 99.9% of poor results can be remedied.
One final revelation: when you get the right segmenting strategy down pat, writing the content gets a lot easier. It’s a new way of thinking: communicating relevant messages leads to more targeted connecting, effective engagement, and better time management.
