Fresh perspectives, fresh ideas for your emails

If you're pounding away on the email treadmill, it can help to have someone press the "pause" button, hand you a pair of binoculars and point you to some fresh ideas and perspectives running free outside in the park.

Kevin Hillstrom, for example, invites us to reflect on the fact that email might make sales, but the vast, vast majority of subscribers aren't buying.

He suggests we could invest less email space in trying for a direct sale, and more in improving various qualities of the customer relationship that eventually lead to more sales.

This concept gels very nicely with what we talked about last week in the return of the email newsletter.

And how about a fresh look at subject lines?

It's hard to find much new insight on that particular piece of the email jigsaw. But Linda Bustos has a fascinating read on how your subject line could (or should) tie in with different buyer personas (personi?)

The implication is that traditional ideas about targeting need to broaden. We need to segment by more than just technical characteristics like "date of last purchase," and consider defining recipients in terms of the decision-making approach they use and similar.

Clever stuff!

Sometimes new thinking means taking existing ideas and transferring them to new applications. Take the idea of incentives.

Discounts, coupons, free downloads etc. are a well-established ploy in email marketing for getting people to sign-up to your list or make a purchase.

Chad White, however, points out how you can use such incentives to get subscribers to take other actions of value to your email program.

And here's another "never thought of that" angle...can you use your email marketing to encourage people to link to your website? Garrett French explores the potential and has a few ideas on how to set about doing it.

Enjoy the view...

Tags: email marketing, email marketing strategy, subject lines

Permalink | March 17, 2008 | 0 comment(s)
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