I’ll save subject lines for another time. But today, let’s talk about targeting and your reason for emailing. Some people believe in the shotgun approach where you send out an email to everyone hoping that enough people will open to justify the return on investment.
However, the problem with doing that often is that you numb your audience. At first, everyone is like a happy puppy and opens every email from you. But as time goes on and they see an email that has nothing to do with them, they stop opening, and worse, often unsubscribe.
So how can you keep them engaged?
First, look at what you promised them when they signed up. Did you offer an informative newsletter once a week? Are you still sending that or are you just sending ads?
Good email campaigns require a lot of self-discipline. It’s fine to send the ads occasionally as long as it doesn’t detract from the useful information.
One suggestion is to work with a copywriter (you can find good ones at elance.com or guru.com), and create 50-60 canned emails of information pertinent to your business. If you want to do a daily or 5 days a week, then increase the number accordingly, and shorten the mailing length.
Most good ESP’s (email service providers) have the ability to set up triggered emails. So once a person signs up, it should trigger a welcome message, and then start the series of emails as per your agreed upon frequency.
So what about the ads. Best practices dictate that you should target the ads to some kind of demographic. If the ad is for women’s shoes, obviously, sending it to women only is the better plan. If you have many brick and mortars, and you’re opening up a new store, sending an announcement of the grand opening to the whole list doesn’t make sense. Border’s made that mistake recently and sent out a special coupon to everyone even though they meant to target a few select zip codes. You can learn from their mistake, and identify where your email will be most effective.
So what if you don’t have this information? Part of list management is regular emails every 3-6 months asking people to log in and update their information. It should be handled carefully. You’re building up a relationship with them. So first you get their name and email address, and you build up their confidence when you only send them what they ask for. After awhile, you state that you need them to re-activate their account, or that you need them to verify information. And you ask them for zip code and gender. Perhaps later on, you can ask for household income, and other interests. Another is asking them top opt-in to special offers. This gets them to their account information on your website, and allows them to fill in more information while either opting in to get 3rd party ads or opting out. Remember, this is a long term process, and you need to treat the person’s information with respect.
When you do this, you’ll have people opening and reading your emails again in no time.

Recently, there were headlines that open rates are dropping in 2007 (From DMNews) which in a nutshell says that the trend is decreasing open rates from 16.11% to 13.98%.

The article said that click rates stayed the same, but they decreased from 3.18% to 2.9%

So, are people getting more cynical? Are email spam filters getting more restrictive and therefore, they’re not even seeing the emails? Have we gotten bombarded by useless newsletters that only contain requests for more money or ads that we just ignore them?

Here’s more to chew on. DMNews also had an interesting article on e-mail marketingas being a rising star. In a nutshell, the author Jordan Ayan feels that e-mail marketin gplans should be recession proof. And he’s correct.

If you have a solid list of people who opted in to receive your information, and you’re regularly providing useful and pertinent information, they’re going to open your emails, and click through to get more details for the snippets that caught their attention. And if they feel they have a relationship with you, then they’re going to be open to receiving ads and requests to purchase.

And to conclude, target, target, target.