Email Content – Keep the promise!

Email Content – Keep the promise! - Part of 4Rs of Marketing Series.

How do you build a relation with your friends? May be you get introduced by someone to a friend or may be you met someone somewhere (online in this case) or may be you just make a promise and live up to it and strengthen your relation with friends and over a period of time convert them to loyal friends.

It’s something similar in case of a customer relationship management through email marketing. Let’s say you were running an ad in a website or hired some space in a targeted newsletter and you were offering something useful for a prospective customer, you started generating traffic to your website through it and got people interested and started increasing your list size. Now, what is important is that you should remember to “keep the promise”, the promise that you made while gathering the information of the prospect. You made a promise to deliver a useful and relevant piece of information like a whitepaper, survey, research report etc. Obviously you should focus on your business, definitely, however, keep your promise by investing in the promise that you made continuously. Or else, you would be not more than anyone else in the same business. The only way you can differentiate is by keeping your promise to the customer during the time you acquired that customer’s relation.

As relevancy is taking the utmost importance in today’s time, it’s imperative to deliver highly relevant content. There are various ways to achieve this. You can manage your CRM system effectively and capture various details about your customers and prospects and leverage that date for delivering highly relevant content. This is no rocket science. It’s something which Google.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo.com and many other companies do, by learning about your preference and delivering what you need.

Additionally you can look at Omniture Segmentation Guide, Docmetrics - Document Optimization, Silverpops – Testing Methodology, Forrester’s Web Analytics report, Geographical optimization, Behavioral Triggering and Instance based triggering.

So let’s say while you are building your CRM database, keep a field open which says “Acquisition Source” which can be a pick list with values like: Banner Ads, Ad Words, Referral, Forward from a Friend etc. However, important thing to notice is to keep another field which says offer chosen like: Whitepaper, Survey, Research Report, Tech Paper, Event registration, Tips and tricks, Videos etc.

Just by doing this small activity you know later on what the interest type of the person was, so that the next time you wish to roll out some offer, you can just bundle it with another Whitepaper, Video, Survey etc and you were able to deliver on your promise while keeping your relation and relevancy.

Some important things to keep in mind are not to use potential SPAM words in the content or else your email deliverability will get hurt. Find the list of TOP 100 potential spam words here.