To blast or not to blast…

Email marketers have a lot of tools at their disposal these days. Their email list management software – their primary tool – will generally have a host of features and advanced functions.  Things like segmenting, triggered and sequential mailings, ways to conduct split tests for content or subject lines, and of course, various ways to analyze all the results in the end.  Most discussion about email these days focuses on the benefits marketers can derive from all these tools, how much their customers really appreciate receiving content that is targeted and relevant, how much they can learn from analyzing their metrics.

Why then does it seem that despite all these capabilities, email marketers still just send generic, untargeted, and frankly unsophisticated email “blasts”?  Why, when they can do so much more and will probably see a better result from their efforts if they do? They seek out the best in terms of the quality of their products, the responsiveness of their staff, the most competitive pricing—yet, when it comes to their email marketing, they are still in blast mode.

Great stories abound about email marketers who do it right. A recent one highlighted the Cirque du Soleil’s email marketing program and illustrated very well how to do things purposefully, with the best interests of the customer in mind.

For example, the Cirque offered subscribers to their list lots of preferences, for example what cities they’d like to attend a show and what types of offers they wanted to receive. They personalized their emails for each city, to make them more relevant.  They also promoted whitelisting and used an automated, double opt-in subscription process. 

But the most important thing they did was to respect users’ preferences. If a subscriber was only interested in shows in one city, that’s the only show he or she was notified about.  And they were vigilant about monitoring their list performance. When the response rate of New Yorkers to a show in New Jersey was low, they stopped sending to the New Yorkers.

The results: an incredibly large database of names that is very clean, higher-than-average subscription rates, and an incredible number of responses to their emails.

The Cirque epitomized the non-blast philosophy. For others though, when it comes to blasting, it may be easy to think, “Why not?”  The incremental costs to sending to your entire list are minimal, the ease at which you can craft a one-size-fits-all message and simply send it out is extraordinary. Doing all that segmenting and creating dynamic content, testing and analyzing—this requires so much time and effort. But does it?

Look at it from your customer’s or your reader’s viewpoint and ask yourself: What benefit are they receiving from you when you send them untargeted emails? What does this do to their impression of the value of their email?

A better way?  Have some fun with your email! Try segmenting your list and being creative with what you offer to each segment. See if it makes a difference in the response. Look at the results from your last email campaign and try crafting an offer to those who didn’t respond the last time. What might entice them? 

How about timing? If you want to send an email, what kind of angle can you come up with to give your customers a reason to open and read your mail? Be creative, be compelling. If you can’t, then maybe you shouldn’t send it.

Because if you look at the bigger picture, i.e. if you look at things from your customers’ viewpoint—as Cirque du Soleil did—you may find that you’re paying prices you don’t realize and these are affecting your ROI. These “prices” may be not be so easily quantifiable, but they exist. They are the cost of annoying and alienating your customers with content that is irrelevant or untimely when instead you could be  demonstrating your commitment to them by providing your customers with the highest quality—not just in terms of your products and services, but in terms of your email communications.

Contact us at editor@lyris.com to share your ideas. We may include it in the next issue of Making Mail Work!