 Have you ever taken the time to consider how much email your readers receive everyday in addition to your email marketing campaigns? And have you considered that you aren’t the only one trying to reach their inbox? If you haven’t it’s about time you do.
If you take a moment to think about your own experience as an email recipient, you’ll probably find that you fall into more than one of the following categories:
1) Sometimes you subscribe to receive great offers, but get them too often, get tired and lose interest.
2) You start receiving email automatically because you purchased something, not knowing you’d get the unexpected flow of email campaigns.
3) You got suckered into filling out a form for an offer that was promised to you only if you filled out several more forms. Then the next day you get email from what seems like every organization currently active.
4) All of a sudden you started getting random email from people telling you to buy their "S0ftw@re", or get their "FREE D0WN10AD5".
5) But above all this, you also look for the non-marketing email messages that are important to you from your friends, family, and colleagues.
Given just these few scenarios above, if the majority of recipients are primarily looking for their personal email, they would still have to sift through the other mass of email messages that they don’t consider part of their close personal network. And many people have even changed email addresses or created an additional one simply to separate the email messages they want from what they don’t want.
So let’s say you aren’t the recipient’s close friend but you still have messaging they gave affirmative consent to receive. How do you differentiate yourself from the rest of the email crowd? And how do you make sure they open and click your email rather than hit the spam button?
Start with the basics. When someone subscribes to your email list, make sure they know what they’re in for – provide email frequency information, message samples, screen shots of what they might receive, and ask them up front to add your return email address to their safe sender list. And if you have the ability, have them set their own preferences for frequency, and segment your email list based on relevant attributes.
Beyond that, be consistent and clear with your messages, and follow CAN-SPAM laws. The simple law of making your subject line relevant to your email content isn’t just for kicks but also shows recipients that you are a legitimate communicator. And beyond the CAN-SPAM laws take a look at some email marketing best practices and quality assurance you should implement for the majority of your email campaigns. (Read: Your 10-point Email Check-Up Plan)
At the end of the day, your job as a marketer is to analyze and understand the needs of your target audience and keep up with what’s going on in the market. If you follow these guidelines, your from address will automatically stand out from the S0ftw@re sender, and there's a higher probability of your email messages being read. Or better yet, the next time they change their email address, they’ll just add you to their safe sender list and notify you that their address has changed.
So when you're setting up your email marketing campaigns remember you aren’t the only one trying to get into the inbox. Remember your experience as an email recipient - what is it that you expect as a reader that would assure the right email senders always get your attention?
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About the Author
Ghia Espino is an account manager at Lyris. She strategizes with clients to improve their online marketing performance and works as their Lyris advocate.
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