Not too long ago it seemed like the email marketing community had a collective heart failure. CLEAR…
Alas, it was just Gmail attempting to provide a better user experience by pre-sorting your incoming emails into new tabs, like the Promotions tab.
The great fear was that if your ‘valuable’ emails got sent to the dreaded Promotions Tab the reader would never see them again.
Here’s a great article from the Marketo website about the Gmail change and how it affects you.
Read the article “How to Survive the Gmail Tabs Marketing Apocalypse” here.
Pretty good summation (they even quote me in the copy).
But the real issue in my mind is that short term, spammy, tricky, and uninformed email marketing strategies are going to have a harder and harder time to survive.
And time-tested, proven, fundamental email strategies will continue work for you. Here are 4 of the things I’d make sure you are doing.
1. Testing
You hire a 10K-per-letter copywriter or sit around a boardroom table and brainstorm all day long but you won’t know which of your subject lines has the best pulling power until you run some basic testing.
I’m working with a client now and we’re testing 3 different subject lines for each message we send out. Sometimes we’re testing a one word change in the message (which can make a big difference) and sometimes we’re making the 3 look TOTALLY different.
The learning that comes from this exercise is really valuable to help you get a handle on what YOUR audience responds to.
If you’re not doing this you shouldn’t be spending 10 seconds worrying about Google… you’ve got bigger issues!
2. Focus on one key point
One common problem I see in emails that cross my desk is the ‘buffet style’ marketing. The notion is if you put something out there, then someone might be interested.
There is so much wrong with this it’s hard to now where to start. Let’s just say, the confused mind is hard pressed to make a decision and usually goes back to what it was doing — deleting emails.
Your opportunity is lost.
If you send an email with a single point and a compelling reason to take a single action, the only choice the brain has to make is YES or NO. Much easier to do.
A short series of YES decisions can get your reader very quickly to to part where they take out their credit card.
Or put another way.
1) Hey let’s go for lunch. We can go for sushi, fast food, a taco, cheeseburger, the salad joint around the corner, fish and chips, Wendy’s, Thai, or BBQ. What do you want?
OR
2) Wanna go for sushi? I know a great place.
Path #2 gets you to a decision faster.
3. Keep it short
The goal of the subject line is to get your reader into the email message. The goal of most email messages is to get your reader to do something else.
It’s not very often that you send an email out that you don’t care what happens. Even in an informational message I like to know which piece of information was the most valuable.
So if your goal is to get your reader to do something else. What is that?
And why do you insist on writing a 300 word article to make it happen?
Here’s the trick (Testing will prove or disprove this for you).
In email, time is at a premium. You need to see a short powerful message to make that YES decision to click. While longer copy works well when people are looking for information it doesn’t work as well when you put the email right in front of them
Just test two versions. You’ll probably see what we’ve seen in our testing. Short will outperform long. (I am aware this goes against what most professional copywriters will tell you)
4. Segment your audience
Seems simple but most of you won’t do this.
Here’s an example. You have a newsletter list. On that list you have your best blue chip customers and Joe Shmoe who just signed up for the newsletter yesterday.
Is it really ok to treat them the same?
I sure hope not.
Make your blue chip customers feel like you appreciate them and make Joe Schmoe feel like he’s involved in the early stages of a new relationship.
Different audience — different message.
Use more segments and watch your opens and clicks soar.
So to me, if you’re zoned in on doing these 4 fundamental email marketing strategies well, you’ll see you won’t have to worry so much about changes in the email marketing landscape.
And there are many more best practices that can help you improve.