It's your other emails that count more
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on April 02, 2007
Reading Jeanniey Mullen's latest ClickZ column admonishing her bank for failing to use email to warn her of some ATM downtime reminded me of this:
Your marketing email has far less impact than all the other email your business sends.
And yet that "other" email gets some of the least attention.
The bank story is a classic example. Would Jeanniey want to publicly blast her bank if the latest marketing email had been slightly irrelevant to her needs? No. They generated the bigger response by screwing up with their customer service.
Think of this. After you buy online, what's the first thing you do?
You check your email repeatedly until the order confirmation arrives. Imagine that. People actually hitting the "get mail" button waiting for an email message from you. That doesn't happen with marketing emails.
Ditto anytime someone contacts customer service.
Those are the "marketing" emails with the biggest potential to engage or enrage the recipient. Not your 5% off new summer selections email.
And another example...list welcome messages. Someone's interested enough in your brand / website /whatever to sign up for your newsletter. That's a hot moment. They're ready and willing. So your welcome message lands on fertile ground.
And yet many people don't even send one. Or send one along the lines of "you signed up."
Imagine if you were at a business meeting and a prospect came up and said, "I love your products. Here's my business card. Soon as you have something new out, please send me a note to let me know about it."
Would you take the card and walk away without a murmur?
Nope, you'd be right in there shaking hands, expressing gratitude, maybe showing the prospect how else you could help them.
So shouldn't your welcome message do the same?
So when you invest all that time in fancy marketing messages, consider the impact all that other email is having. Consider the brand building or brand destruction your transactional emails, customer service emails, list messages and other communications are doing. Then improve them.
More on transactional and list messages | Tags: email marketing, branding, customer service, list welcome messages
Your marketing email has far less impact than all the other email your business sends.
And yet that "other" email gets some of the least attention.
The bank story is a classic example. Would Jeanniey want to publicly blast her bank if the latest marketing email had been slightly irrelevant to her needs? No. They generated the bigger response by screwing up with their customer service.
Think of this. After you buy online, what's the first thing you do?
You check your email repeatedly until the order confirmation arrives. Imagine that. People actually hitting the "get mail" button waiting for an email message from you. That doesn't happen with marketing emails.
Ditto anytime someone contacts customer service.
Those are the "marketing" emails with the biggest potential to engage or enrage the recipient. Not your 5% off new summer selections email.
And another example...list welcome messages. Someone's interested enough in your brand / website /whatever to sign up for your newsletter. That's a hot moment. They're ready and willing. So your welcome message lands on fertile ground.
And yet many people don't even send one. Or send one along the lines of "you signed up."
Imagine if you were at a business meeting and a prospect came up and said, "I love your products. Here's my business card. Soon as you have something new out, please send me a note to let me know about it."
Would you take the card and walk away without a murmur?
Nope, you'd be right in there shaking hands, expressing gratitude, maybe showing the prospect how else you could help them.
So shouldn't your welcome message do the same?
So when you invest all that time in fancy marketing messages, consider the impact all that other email is having. Consider the brand building or brand destruction your transactional emails, customer service emails, list messages and other communications are doing. Then improve them.
More on transactional and list messages | Tags: email marketing, branding, customer service, list welcome messages
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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