Innovating Email List Marketing

In the past it used to be so easy.  TV ads about us. Radio ads about us. Direct email about our offers. Talking about us got us a lot of business.

Those days are over.

Let’s take your email communications with your target audience. How many of your  email newsletters including valuable, relevant information specifically designed with your customers in mind?

If you’re like most marketers, the majority of your emails include special offers, coupons, rebates and other emails about how “great” we are.  Is this working for you?

Sometimes brands get so enamored with their products and services they start to think that customers actually care.  They don’t.  Customers care about themselves.  Period.  When we send customers email communications that is not targeted to their pain points, we lose.

The relevant solution for prospective customers

Your email has to be about something more than your products and services.  It has to be about something bigger.

What are your customers’ pain points?  What are their true needs?  Are you solving their problems with great email content, or are you spamming them?

Think of it this way…does your email newsletter and other email communications have a soul?  If you believe you have a remarkable product or service, then you must also have a remarkable email newsletter.

Is your email marketing  suffering from heart failure?

Don’t take my word for it…just check the signs.  What’s your email open rate on your enewsletter?  What is your opt-out rate? These are the “vital signs” where your communications strategy lets you know if its thriving, or suffering from “heart failure,” that is communication without real sentiment and meaning behind it.

If so, don’t despair. Just get back to the heart of the matter: talk to your customers.  Survey them to find out what they really need to know.  Listen online using tools like Twitter Search and Google Alerts to see what’s really going on with your customers.

By focusing on your customers, you can develop a newsletter that is requested and anticipated.  What would it do for your business if your customers actually looked forward to your marketing?  When that happens, you’ve made it not about yourselves, but about something more.  Something bigger.  Something with a soul.

Joe Pulizzi (http://joepulizzi.com), one of the foremost experts in content marketing,  is co-author of Get Content Get Customers (http://getcontentgetcustomers) and founder of Junta42 (http://junta42.com), a content marketing-vendor matching site for marketing professionals.

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email, email marketing, Joe Pulizzi, Marketfish