Email is easy and affordable. But how do you make sure your message stands out,and gets read, in a crowded inbox?

Let’s face it the economy may be getting better, but times are still tough. We all know it is much easier to sell to an existing customer than to go out hunting for a new one. If you don’t communicate with your customers, they may forget about you, or move on to a new provider. Email marketing, when done properly, can be a very cost-effective way to communicate. However, it is very easy to turn this great marketing tool into a disaster that will anger your customers, and turn away potential sales.

Email marketing doesn’t have the greatest reputation these days due to the excessive amounts of unsolicited spam people receive. This is why it is so important to carefully plan what you want to send to your hard-earned customers. To help cut through the clutter, let’s discuss what types of email you should be sending, what you should include in your message, and how frequently you should be corresponding with your customers. To get started, let’s discuss three different types of email marketing.

Promotional email
This email is essentially a coupon or marketing hook to pique interest in your products right away. They contain discounts and limited-time offers to help drive immediate action. They are typically used in a retail environment and are sent to customers who have specifically requested to be notified of product and price promotions.

Newsletters
Email newsletters are typically an information source for your customers. The more relevant information you can include, the more likely your customers are to read, appreciate, and forward your message.

Email blast
An email blast is similar to a newsletter but far shorter, typically no more than a paragraph, with a link to more information back on your website. This allows your customers to quickly skim your email to see if they are interested in the content.

One of the most common questions I am asked is, how often should I send email communications to my customers, and when should I send them? As a general rule, promotional emails should be sent during your busiest season when you are likely to attract customers. During peak growing seasons, you could send promotions as often as weekly, and scale back to monthly through slower seasons. They are also an effective tool to promote over-stocked items that are priced to move.
Due to the amount of time required to read a lengthy newsletter, it is best to avoid bombarding your customers. In an effort to avoid newsletter fatigue you should be planning your campaigns quarterly. Several studies have shown the highest readership for quarterly newsletters will be in February, May, August, and late October/early November. An email blast can be sent on a more frequent monthly basis. You are going to get a far greater open rates on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, for all types of email communication.

Now that we have established the best times to send out a newsletter, we come to a more important question. What are customers and potential customers looking for?

The number one rule when sending any type of email marketing is to make sure you are providing value to your customers. The people who receive your email are not really interested in what is going on with your business, unless it can help them in some way. If your communication provides value to them, it will get read. If it does not, your emails will likely find their way to the trash bin or to the unsubscribe button.

Now, let’s have a look at promotional emails, and what they can do to drive traffic to your location or website. When you are sending out a weekly promotion make sure to plan out several different promotions. Different people are interested in different types of promotions. By keeping them varied, you will be able to hit a broader market and track the effectiveness of different campaigns. The best way to track effectiveness is to include a link back to a coupon. (If you are selling via e-commerce you can use a promotion code).

Most modern email newsletter programs allow you to track not only how many people open your email, but also how many people clicked links within the newsletter. If you are sending promotions that many people are opening, without clicking the link, then it’s time to rethink the promotion. A great way to create a sense of urgency and provide value at the same time is provide a coupon for a limited giveaway. As an example, you could provide coupon that entitles the first 50 or 100 customers who spend “X” to receive a book about gardening or a gardening tool.

Now, to contradict everything any marketer will tell you, when you send your quarterly newsletters, try not to sell. This all comes back to providing value to your customers. Most of them will have no interest in reading a lengthy advertisement for your company. You may be the best at what you do, but your customers don’t want to hear it. They want to know why you are the best. Hand out your knowledge freely to show that you are an expert. Give out information that they will be able to use when planting next year’s garden, or for the long cold winter months, talk about indoor plants as a great way to beat the winter blues. People buy from people they trust. It is your job to ensure that you are, and remain, your customers’ trusted advisor. A few years ago I bought a house during the winter.

When summer arrived, much to my dismay, I discovered a hard-packed dirt farm where I expected to find a lawn. Not wanting to admit that I knew nothing about lawns, I went out and bought a big bag of seed, some soil and went to work. The result was a slightly smaller dirt farm by the end of the summer. This continued throughout the next few summers. Then last March the answer came to me, not from doing research, or admitting that I had a problem and asking for help. No, help came in the form of an email. About one third of a newsletter I received from a major retail outlet was dedicated to tips on how to plant and maintain a good lawn. This year I have a lush green back yard and I am once again proud to have people over for the summer BBQ season. Where do you think I purchased the grass seed, soil, fertilizer and several other plants, including a tree, for my front yard?

Building on the theme of providing knowledge and value to your customers, you can also send a monthly email blast with helpful hints. Because you are sending email blasts on a more frequent basis, it is best to keep them short and provide links to more information. This will allow you to track which hints are most often read, without overwhelming your recipients with too much information. As an added bonus, when you do drive customers to your website to read the tip of the month, you can feature promotions that could lead to further sales.

I’d like to share a quick tip about subject lines. Even though they are one of the most important parts of your email, subject lines are often overlooked. The best way to get people to read your email is to tell them what they can expect and how it will help them. Here is an example of a bad subject line: “ABC Corporation Quarterly Newsletter.” This subject line tells you who the email is from and what it is, but there is no call to action that makes you want to read it. To make it dynamic and get your readers’ attention, give them a glimpse of what is to come. “Let ABC Corporation teach you how to turn your dirt farm into lush green lawn.”

Email client vs. deployment system
A common misconception is that you can achieve the same effect by doing a mass email broadcast from Outlook or other mail programs as you can using a proper deployment system. This is not the case. I will focus here on three specific reasons.

Tracking: Most email clients, like Microsoft Outlook, have a notification feature. However, research shows that many people find it annoying and most people decline it. As a matter of fact, many computers now have settings to automatically decline any read receipts without the user ever knowing one was requested. Any proper deployment system tracks whether the email was sent, opened, bounced or if any links were clicked on, thus giving you all the information you require to move forward.

CanSpam Act: This is a law that has been evolving quite a lot in the past few years to battle spammers. A good example of a privacy violation would be if you were to send an email where you see everyone who is in the copied field. With a proper deployment system, the person’s actual email address is used and nobody else has access. In addition, a proper deployment system will automatically remove bounced emails and remove from list requests. For more information on the legal issues surrounding spam please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003.

Rich HTML emails: Presentation isn’t everything, but it can go a long way to help get you recognized. With most email programs, formatting options are very limited. They mainly use plain text. Using a deployment system, you can include imagery that will help create the mindset you are looking for, as well as showcasing your corporate branding with detailed information.

Newsletter marketing is a broad topic and it was a challenge to condense into one article. Hopefully, I have given you some useful tips and examples of how to get started. If you have any questions please feel free to give me a call or send email me at enews@c7.ca and I’d be happy to talk with you and provide you with information targeted specifically to your needs.

     
Josh Hayter is director of sales and marketing with c-Seven Media, an Ontario-based website design and web hosting company.