The new email marketing: live the R word

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on May 12, 2008

Part 2 of an ongoing series:

(We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.)

Let's begin with the R word. Now don't scream, but here it is...relationships.

Finished screaming? Think you might have heard it all before? No, you haven't. Here's why...

The new email marketing demands a mindset that pays more than lip service to the concept of relationships.

We can all tell the difference between customer service mandated from above and customer service that results from a true willingness to please the customer.

So it is with email and the relationship. If you truly value the email relationship with recipients, then that attitude pervades all your activities and lets you employ winning tactics (see below) you'd otherwise not think of.

Here's what I wrote to a friend earlier today in a conversation about different communication technologies:

"At the end of the day what really drives success is the quality and value you deliver. That's all that matters. If you have a niche and strive constantly and consistently to deliver this quality and value, it will pay off in the end."

"People's ability to take in information hasn't magically improved. So however you cut and dice it, there's only room for a few voices to be truly heard. And the quality voices will rise to the top."

Delivering quality and value comes naturally when you are relationship oriented. Or as Al DiGuido puts it, think of subscribers like family:

"Your family members don't want to see themselves as a segment or target. They want communications that are personalized, relevant, and meaningful to them..."

Once you see recipients as people you want to keep happy and loyal, best practices fall out naturally.

The relationship mindset encourages you to think of email in terms of dialog and interaction, which leads to tactics that boost the customer engagement we're all supposed to be chasing. Stefan Pollard has some ideas for you on that topic.

It changes your tone of voice to one that resonates better with those you are trying to reach. So you automatically add more value to (and generate more value from) such things as:

Technical messages like error pages and subscription confirmations (Wendy Roth shows how you can benefit from replacing the technobabble with real speech.)
Transactional, trigger and one-to-one emails (Aaron Smith describes some best practices for those messages.)
Welcome emails (Anna Yeaman offers her favorites here.)

And it drives other best practices certain to boost the right numbers.

It stimulates you to send timely messages based on what you know of the end receiver, such as birthday greetings. It encourages you to deliver valuable content. It stimulates you to send personalized email based on the recipient's unique needs or characteristics.

All of which drives trust, relevancy, credibility and a host of other buzzwords that summed up lead to one clear outcome: more and better responses to your email.

Tags: email marketing, relationship marketing, transactional emails, email strategy

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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