How to stand out in the inbox

By Mark Brownlow |

Billions of emails get sent daily. That's an awful lot of email. Commercial, business and private email is all hurtling its merry way toward your customers and prospects. Their inboxes are overflowing.

A few years ago, you could generate interest in your email messages just by sending them. Now that every net-savvy business is offering an email newsletter or three, and email marketing is all the rage, those days are long gone. Email fatigue means it's all too easy for your message to disappear into the morass, doomed to join the spam mails and e-cards gathering dust in the delete folder.

It's not all bad news though. Many online businesses will not recognize the need, or make the effort, or have the skills, to improve the standards of their email communications. If you can see the need, make the effort and gain (or buy) the necessary skills, then you can break through the fatigue barrier and benefit from your competitors' failings.

So how do you need to change your approach to deal with an increasingly skeptical audience, one that's willing to give your email just a couple of seconds time before moving on to the 27th of 165 new messages? Here are some suggestions...

1. Value and respect your prospects and subscribers

With choice comes selectivity. The more emails people have to pile through, the easier they find it to ignore, delete or unsubscribe. Readers are a scarce commodity. Value them and respect them. If you don't, they'll migrate to the emails of those businesses that do value and respect readers and their time.

Sure, think of the return on investment and other such metrics, but don't forget that there's a human at the end of your email doing you a favor by reading what you have to say. Get their permission to market to them, and respect this permission once you've got it. Permission-based email marketing is the only route to long-term success.

2. Get professional in your email marketing

You don't have to be a marketing professional to succeed, but you do need to get professional in your marketing. If you don't, your competitors (that's everyone else mailing your customers and prospects) will.

Professionalism means paying detailed attention to every aspect of email marketing, including planning and scoping your newsletters or campaigns, designing and copywriting the emails and landing pages, managing and analyzing subscriber databases, communicating with subscribers, contributors, advertisers and others, and much more.

Learn the skills yourself from online resources or outsource to those with the experience and knowledge to do the job for you.

3. Deliver value

The recipients of your mail are listening to that well-known radio station, WIIFM: what's in it for me? As well as guiding the way you write copy for commercial offerings, this means you have to give your subscribers a good reason for staying subscribed. It means you have to deliver value.

Email newsletters have to be useful, timely, relevant and (as far as possible) unique. Email promotions need to deliver relevant offers to the right audience, and delight those who accept those offers.

4. Engage and influence your readers

If it's long-term success you're after, then you'll be looking to build relationships with the recipients of your mails. Valuable content may not be enough. You need to engage the readers' interest and establish a feeling of connectedness between them and you.

You can do this through the way you write and present your emails. Who wants to have a relationship with a marketing department? Introduce a human voice and personality to your messages. Learn the principles of human persuasion.

5. Dare to be different

You're not the only one trying to engage and influence your readers. And you're not the only one who's read the right guides to copywriting and email marketing. If you're getting into a marketing rut, dare to try something different.

Being bigger, brighter, pushier or snazzier is not the solution; that just contributes to the fatigue problem. Take a step back and brainstorm a little. The worse you can do is fail (!) But you might just key into a method or design or technique or phrasing that sets your messages apart from the hundreds, and thousands, and hundreds of thousands of other commercial messages vying for attention.

Here's to your success!