Email Marketing Strategy

Posted By emailadmin on July 3, 2008

Welcome back!

This time, we will discuss the receivers of your emails. Whether you’re a brick and mortar or virtual, your customers have one thing in common: they wanted to buy what you had.  So take a moment to think about what you are selling.

Let’s say for example you’re selling dairy products.  More specifically, organic dairy products that can only be purchased in health food stores.  Ok, you can figure out that your customer is someone who cares about their health, and is willing to pay a premium for that peace of mind.

But, Lara, you’re asking, what if I’m selling a variety of things? Or what if they want my products for a variety of reasons?

This is where segmenting comes into play!

Perhaps you know some people want organic dairy for their children.  You can send them a one off advert for your new frozen yogurt pop.  Probably a coupon would help.

And even better, some suggested placers in their area where they could redeem it.

So how do you learn all of this information?

Well, you could set up a few different newsletters and see which are the most popular.  And then send the targeted coupons to that distribution list.

More importantly, this is something you should be capturing as soon as possible.  Name, email address, gender, zip code.  The more information you can get up front, the better your targeting will be.

You will have far better results if you send a mailing to 10 people that you can say with confidence will want your product then you would blasting it out to 10,000 people who won’t read it.  Worse, some may unsubscribe because of it, and you dilute your effectiveness.

Now, what does this have to do with a consultant.  Well, if you know exactly to whom you’re emailing, you can tell your consultant to generate a mailing segment with specified demographics.    Knowing who your customer is will also help the copywriter come up with a few solid subject lines that can be split tested.  And it will help your graphic designer choose what to put in the creative.  (i.e. photos of men vs. women, adults vs. children, etc.)

And here’s the checklist:

1) Have you been capturing demographic data?  If not, start a plan to capture it.

2) Who is your average customer.  What are they going to want to see and hear from you?

3) Work with the consultant for creating a solid test segment, copy, and creative.

4) Test, Test, Test.

Next time, we’ll talk about the frequency of your mailings.

Prior Posts in the Series
Working with Email Consultants Part 1

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