Email – where once it was the backbone of many marketing campaigns, consumers relationship with this communication platform has become more than a little difficult. Keeping subscribers and customers engaged has become a case of battling ’email fatigue’.
As Deren Baker agues though in this excellent piece, we are not seeing the end of email marketing, it just requires more research, strategy and execution to make it work for you.
“How quickly does email fatigue set in? Faster than you can say “unsubscribe.” MarketingSherpa recently revealed that just 15 percent of email users surveyed thought that the messages they receive from marketers were always useful,” he writes.
Is this disconnect between would-be loyal consumers and businesses, then, dooming email marketing? Not necessarily. Companies willing to change their messaging from self-promotional to customer-centric can avoid the crash and burn — and that change starts with a deep dive into consumers’ viewing behaviors.”
Know your customer, know your strategy
“If you don’t know your customers, you can’t enhance your branding efforts. But if you do know them, you can reference cultural touchstones you know will resonate, and get a sense of the emotions they respond to that might motivate them in the sales process. ”
Give consumers what they really want.
“To increase your emails’ influence, consider taking a new approach to understanding your consumers.”
“Chances are, you already have demographic information about your prospects and current customers, but knowing age and location isn’t always enough. You need to know your audience’s habits, interests and lifestyle choices. By partnering with entities that can help you sift through consumer behaviors online and off, you can gather that critical information and build out the profiles you’ve started.”
In the piece he points to a range of analytical tools available now that will boost your capacity to better understand your audience. Yes, it will take some more, but the pay offs are there.
“If you dig deep into consumer viewing habits, you’ll likely find the gold you need to boost engagement in your next email-marketing campaign,” he says. “The closer you get to understanding your audience, the closer you’ll get to eradicating email fatigue and building lasting loyalty.”
You can read the full piece here and be sure to talk to us about the business2one services we offer that can assist in building, growing and maintaining your email marketing platform.