With so many emails coming in their inbox every day, it is not surprising that people don’t read most of the monotonous mass marketing emails anymore. To make your email stand out in your customers’ inbox, the secret is to understand what they find relevant and beneficial. Your customers today need more customized information that is tailored to fit their specific needs and match their experience.
This article explains what information you need to have in your customer database and how you can use this information to create customized emails for your customers. Making your customers feel as if they are the most valued and special ones is the key to successful email marketing.
Get Started with the Right Information
When you are creating customized email campaigns for your customers, just having their name and email address is not enough. You need to know as much about your customers as you can to understand what they would like to see in their mailbox.
The seven most essential things to keep in your customer database are their name, email address, date of subscription, purchase history, downloads history, interests and their city and state. The more information you can get, the better it will be. Once you have all the information, you can create a much more customized and satisfactory email marketing campaign.
When you incorporate this information in the emails you send out, it makes your customers feel that you care for their needs, making your image as a trustworthy business. Once you collect the information, it is also important to understand how you can design customized campaigns with this information.
Content is King
At the heart of it all, content is the thing that you rely on to pass your messages to your recipients. No matter what goal you’re planning to achieve with your email, what your content is and how it’s presented can make a huge difference. Here’re a few tips to keep in mind when playing with the ‘King’ card:
- It’s NOT always about what you want.One of the most common mistakes that businesses are making these days when crafting email content is that they often simply put what they want in the email. Whether it’s a promotion, an offer or some pieces of company news, it’s what the people in charge of the email campaign would like to see, not the recipients! Take your time to research for the type of content that resonates best with your recipients before actually starting your work, and then keep testing to see how your recipients respond with their behaviors.
- There’s a limitation on your content length.Though you have to provide enough content to get your messages across, you may also put yourself under risk if your content is too long. The No. 1 risk comes from the spam filters. Most of them don’t like lengthy content. Too many words piled in the email may get you ended up in the junk or spam folder. Secondly, your recipients may feel uncomfortable neither. Not everyone likes ‘reading’ emails. Actually, most people prefer ‘scanning’ these days. Too much information a time could get your recipients overwhelmed. Last but not the least, the longer your content is, the more formatting issues you are probably going to run into.
- Avoid words that may get you marked as spam. Yes, there’s a spam-trigger wordslist available with around 200 words on it. Not really a secret today since there’re many open resources on the net. However, the short list below covers what we refers to as ‘email disaster words’ that I’d like to share with you as an in-house recipe:
- Free
- Visit our website
- Opportunity
- 50% Off
- Click here
- Call now
- Subscribe
- Bonus
- Discount
- Save up to
- Winner
- Prizes
- Information you requested
- Important information regarding
- Guarantee, Guaranteed
- Special Promotion
- Great Offer/Deal
- All New
- One Time
- Order Now
Add a Personal Feel to the Email
After the content, next thing to remember is that you should not send information about every campaign to all your subscribers. When you have all the information about them, you should analyze which campaign they are likely to find interesting and then use some more of that information to write personalized emails. For example, if your customer lives in the state of Alaska, you can send the email message stating, “Hello George. I see you have subscribed to my website. How do you like it? What more changes would you like to see? I’m happy to announce that the updated version of my book is now available in the market. More importantly, it is available at 40% off for my subscribers living in Alaska. I hope you’d like to enjoy a copy for more updated information.”
Similarly you can use all the other information to make a more personalized effort and make your customers feel that they are the most important one for you. As the advertising guru David Ogilvy said, “Customer is not a moron; she is your wife.” You have to treat them with special care and make them feel valued to obtain customer satisfaction.
You can design a lot of different loyalty-based programs for those who have a substantial purchase history with you. You can base these programs on their birthdays, their anniversaries or any other holiday season like Christmas or Valentine’s Day.
Handle With Expertise
In the end, it is very important to remember that email marketing hold a very important part in your complete marketing campaign. Taking it lightly as an unimportant matter or getting a novice to handle it can turn out to be bad for your business. Emails can be one of the most intimate and effective ways of communicating with your customers and should be handled with expertise. Adding just a few personal touches to the emails and devoting a bit of extra time can be highly beneficial for you in the end.
About the Author:
Sophia Myles is the Product Specialist from Comm100 Email Marketing Team. She’s a complete enthusiast in Email Marketing, while when free from work, she can be found writing and sharing just everything about Online Marketing with the rest of the world.