Remember, email marketing DOES work, it's just being POORLY DONE by so many people. However, if you follow Canada's Anti-Spam laws and focus your content on WII.FM, and you have a Content Strategy for your Email Marketing you can convert leads into sales too.

 

Your content strategy for your e-newsletter should have at least the following 3 elements. And the purpose of making this content strategy is that you create the creative head space to plan out your e-newsletter messages according to these 3 requirements of best practices for email marketing:

 

1) Target Market PER list. You can separate your email service into lists - i.e. don't send the same message to everyone on your list. They won't all be interested in the same things. For instance, we have a large DIY core of small micro businesses on our list. This is not the same information that we send out to the mid-sized company clients - they want us to be the expert, they don't have time to read the content marketing best practices tips we follow--they just want us to implement them for their campaigns.

 

2) Frequency: Just as this info-graphic suggests, you want to make sure you have a plan for how frequently you will send out your newsletter. One mistake a lot of people make is that they send a whole bunch at once, then peter off. The Tangy Words e-news is a monthly e-newsletter. Users who sign up for it first receive a 7 week free e-course that has exercises to help them figure out how to better engage their customers ( rather than shove themselves in front with meaningless marketing spew). We make this really clear when customers sign up and we only send them a letter once a month--because each digest tries to have lots of good information in it. We don't want to make them feel like they have to keep up each day or week with new messages. That is simply too much reading taking them away from their core business. We all make time for professional development -- but we can't all make time for it everyday (at least not with the same company, working on the same part of our business for a long period of time!)

 

3) WII.FM Focus.  There's a particular e-newsletter that drives all of us crazy. You recognize them by their subject line, typically it will repeat the name of their newsletter and the date--but the subject line of the newsletter contains nothing that is interesting to you. So you delete it. Maybe first you mark them as "Junk Mail" because you realize you've gotten a few of these same e-newsletters the past while and you are SICK OF THEM! For the person who spent all that time making that e-newsletter--it's been a waste. They have just done more brand damage than good. And if they had already spent time making sure you were in the target audience, they lost the opportunity to speak meaningfully to you simply by having a terrible subject line that wasn't focused on YOUR interests, but on their company's interests. Not good.

 

If training on this information is the kind of thing you recognize your company needs to know more about - make a quick free call (1-855-287-3311 Canada or 1-800-287-331 to Tangible Words so we can tell you more about the Email Marketing Training Program we lead in-house for companies.