Conquer noise in the inbox: how to create priority emails
Winning the customers’ attention in their inbox has become highly competitive. People are getting a lot of email. Who is to say which emails are going to be opened by recipients? According to a study conducted by Lyris, 145 billion emails are sent per day. Personal, work and social emails tend to be priority. However, promotional and marketing emails are becoming more important to customers – mainly because marketers are getting smarter.
The new email marketing era is all about data. Having relevant data to create targeted communications results in happy customers. Data is just one component to conquer noise in the inbox. I’ve highlighted 4 important practices to gain priority over mass emails and increase open rates. Ultimately applying these best practices will encourage successful email marketing performance.
1. Be data-conscious.
Send to active customers – those who care about your product or service. There is a time and place to send to less active customers. The key is targeting communications for each customer set. Customers can be segmented across various dimensions. The development of segments is dependent on the course you are looking to take your campaign.
Sometimes you want to inform every one of your segments about a new offering. That is great! However, there are different language tones that can be applied to better relate to the customer and drive successful email marketing results. For example, active customers, those who open/click, purchase, etc., should be acknowledged as valued customers who are first to be informed of the new offering. Or provide them with some sort of “special treatment.” Those who have not purchased or have not been active for a long period of time can be approached differently as well as those who have never been active or purchased.
As you can see being data conscious and building a connection with the customer with the language you use can mean all the difference when developing successful email marketing campaigns.
2. Use a memorable Friendly From.
There are ways that can increase your chances of becoming an email sender that your customers look forward to receiving. Testing the email Friendly From could indicate what will drive more opens. Think about looking at your inbox. What is the first thing you see? It is either the Friendly From name or the subject line (especially on mobile). However, if you see one of your favorite brands in the Friendly From, you are likely going to open it whether you read the subject line or not.
With that in consideration, it is important to catch the attention of those who have not yet considered you as a favorite. Testing the Friendly From could catch their attention and a profound friendship can be established transitioning them to an active customer.
3. Encourage offers.
It is only natural to be satisfied when receiving an offer. If you can manage to provide customers with an incentive to taking action your campaign response will evidently improve. To maintain successful email marketing campaigns it is important to understand that you will likely need to give a little to get something in return.
It may be tough to justify a monetary incentive, but in the long term you will be building a relationship that will win against other email senders among all the noise in the inbox. Sometimes a monetary incentive is not possible. Try getting creative and coming up with other ways to provide incentive to customers, like a loyalty program or premium support.
4. Be creative.
Show diversity. Sending email campaigns does not mean you have to stick to one template. Exercise creativity and see what customers respond to by testing. Customers may be driven to open email based on past alluring content and imagery. Creative appeal can be exciting to customers – especially knowing that it is not the same email as all the others in their inbox.
Having a creative angle that is dynamic will keep recipients engaged. An email that looks exactly the same will only drive customers to not open it or gloss over content as if they’ve seen it before. Creative testing is the most effective way to measure successful email marketing and a great tactic to stay competitive.
It can be a tough undertaking to strengthen customer relationships so that emails are not neglected in the inbox. However, it does not have to be painful! Choose a tactic and start a testing strategy to conquer the inbox and resonate the most with customers. Keep in mind that anticipated emails are opened and lack of interest becomes noise in a full inbox.
At Jacobs & Clevenger, we send almost 10 million emails each year for our clients. That’s why we’re such strong advocates of optimizing success of email marketing campaign performance. We strongly suggest a strategic approach to optimize email performance and take email marketing efforts to a more effective level. Take our free email marketing assessment to discover how to improve email effectiveness.