How quickly does email fatigue set in? Faster than you can say “unsubscribe.” MarketingSherpa recently revealed that just 15 percent of email users surveyed thought that the messages they receive from marketers were always useful.
Is this disconnect between would-be loyal consumers and businesses, then, dooming email marketing? Not necessarily. Companies willing to change their messaging from self-promotional to customer-centric can avoid the crash and burn — and that change starts with a deep dive into consumers’ viewing behaviors.
Want engaged readers? Get to know them, beginning with an exploration of the types of content they prefer. As an Experian report indicated, emails offering a personal flair based on users’ needs drove up click rates by 27 percent and open rates by 11 percent.
Know your customer, know your strategy.
If you don’t know your customers, you can’t enhance your branding efforts. But if you do know them, you can reference cultural touchstones you know will resonate, and get a sense of the emotions they respond to that might motivate them in the sales process.
For example, consumers who watched Santa Clarita Diet (a horror-comedy on Netflix about a California family) were 20 times more likely to purchase CeraVe skincare products on Amazon, according to a Jumpshot report. Were CeraVe aware of that connection, it could promote its products directly to those consumers already likely to purchase its products.
Of course, getting closer to readers presents a major challenge: Another Experian rerport showed that more than four out of five marketers reportedly struggle to define customer personas. In other words, they’re clueless about the content consumers crave.
A colleague of mine tells me she’s experiencing this problem first-hand. Turns out, she signed up for a company’s email list, assuming she’d receive more information about the business that way. Instead, she’s being bombarded with daily GIFs and visual puns that aren’t making her laugh. The sender is clearly risking losing her — and other customers — through this ill-thought-out joke-a-day format.
Of course my colleague’s experience isn’t unique. Plenty of companies lean toward including imagery in their email campaigns. And in theory that’s smart. But, if that imagery isn’t compelling viewers to take…
