eMarket2 Blogs

Have you ever considered the long term impact that your eMail marketing is having on your company’s brand?

On the one hand, your eMail campaigns can positively enhance your brand and result in sales opportunities. On the other, if handled carelessly, eMail communication is potentially intrusive and can harm your brand.

Untargeted and irrelevant eMails can cause irreparable damage to your brand image. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that everything you say is of value to your prospects – it isn’t!

Segment and target

Next to consider is brand perception and what influences it. Relevant eMail communications enhance brand perception. Try testing different message content in small ‘seed’ batches to measure feedback. Bear in mind also that if you offer a wide range of products, it’s unlikely that every customer or prospect will be interested in every product you have to offer.

Far better to segment and target: state-of-the-art eMail marketing systems (such as eM2’s ePartner) can assemble and broadcast eMails with ‘dynamic content’ in real-time. Providing your eMailing list contains product preferences, demographic information or similar, the content of your eMails (both text and images) can be made relevant to each individual customer or prospect. Make sure your brand name is used prominently in both the eMail subject line and body text and that your brand logo and graphics are consistent with offline versions.

And remember, your readers must benefit from the eMail, even though the content of each message will vary from reader to reader, the overall value or ‘usefulness’ must be kept as high as possible. While content value is assisted by segmentation and targeting, the quality of your emails remains critical.

eMail frequency

The right eMail frequency enhances brand perception. In general, recipients prefer to be contacted at intervals of weeks rather than days. The lower the frequency the more relevant each eMail must be. The goal is to achieve maximum benefit from minimum frequency, but there can be many opposing factors:

Too low a frequency produces an ‘out of sight out of mind’ effect. Also, the tendency with lower-frequency communications is that you’re tempted to pack in too much content.

The results, however, are not linear: doubling your eMail frequency by doubling your eMail marketing budget is unlikely to double your number of sales leads. In fact, simply doubling your eMail frequency could decrease your enquiries.

Let your readers decide. Allow them to communicate their preferences for frequency, product and content. Simply providing this choice, even if it’s not taken up, will improve your brand value immeasurably.

Evaluate your current eMail strategy

Here’s a check list of recommendations. It’s based on years of experience and many thousands of email campaigns:

Segmentation

Are you segmenting your campaigns to deliver the most relevant copy possible?

Dynamic content

Does your eMail marketing system allow you to use product preferences to assemble and broadcast ‘dynamically-personalised’ eMails in real-time?

Test broadcasts

Are you testing different messages, offers and designs to determine which works best for you?

Preferences

Have you set up a preference section in your eMails so that your readers can choose their preferences for frequency, product and content?

Frequency vs value

Do you only eMail your readers when you have something of value to communicate? Consider both monetary and non-monetary value issues, i.e. quality content as well as product offers.

Reinforce existing brand recognition

Do you reinforce your brand name by using it in the ‘From’ line? Is your corporate ID being used in your eMail campaigns?

This applies equally to well-established brands. Imagine, for example, a well-known car manufacturer with a quality brand image and a well-recognised logo. If that manufacturer used the parent company’s name in the eMail ‘From’ line, instead of its own, confusion would start to creep in.

If they then failed to use their well-known logo in the body of the eMail, but used other, little-known images, they would be missing an excellent opportunity, and even eventually lowering the main logo’s public recognition.

Relevance

If they then sent out high-frequency, untargeted eMails to people who could not currently afford their car, the recipients would quickly change their perception of both the car and the company.

This could have such a negative effect, that when the prospects are eventually looking for a car of that price and quality, they wouldn’t even shortlist it!

The car manufacturer would have been better off compiling an opted-in mailing list, built up from visitors to their website, complete with product preferences.