Do you know what your reader cares about?
March 19th, 2007 by
Kelly Rusk
You probably spend a lot of time preparing your email: getting your company messages right, sending it out according to your calendar, analyzing your results… But do you ever stop and wonder about what the reader cares about? Do they remember you? Do they want to receive the messages you are sending?
Jeanniey Mullen, posted an interesting piece on the topic, including a partial checklist:
- Know what the reader expects. Your readers gave you their e-mail addresses because they were expecting something. A receipt, a whitepaper, a newsletter, or something similar. Does the next message you’ll send give them content they expect to see?
- Understand most readers forget quickly. In many cases, readers signed up for your e-mail list because they wanted access to something or as an impulse opt-in. If you wait too long before contacting them, they’ll forget why you were so important. Keep this in mind when timing your next e-mail.
- Where does the e-mail take the reader in the site? Knowing how deep in the site the e-mail links your readers is critical. Copy tone and content should match the destination page pretty closely. That way, the transition makes sense.
- Define success metrics first. Reader interest isn’t determined by the number of e-mail messages delivered. It’s derived from the click-to-open rate. Set a target before you send so you can benchmark yourself on success (25 percent is average).
- Look at the e-mail landscape. Just because it’s not a marketing e-mail doesn’t mean the reader doesn’t receive other e-mail from your company. Being cognizant of this is key to determining send frequency. It’s not about what your company’s policy is, it’s about the reader’s experience.
- Check out what your competitors are sending. It may not be your company’s e-mail that turns off the reader. It could be the volume of e-mail in the category itself. If the reader subscribes to financial advice e-mail from seven companies and you all send on the same day, the recipient won’t read any of them. This isn’t your fault, unless you knew about the bottlenecked delivery. But it’s your responsibility to find out what makes sense from a broader perspective.
Read the whole article
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Email marketing |
Says:
March 19th, 2007 at
9:03 pm
Thanks for sharing this. It is all essential information that every email marketer should consider before they press the send button.
Sending a message for the sake of sending without first identifying the goals and how to achieve them just doesn’t make sense.
