Discover the Need for Non-Promotional Email Messages

Is your company guilty of this unpardonable offense? Sending out a constant stream of sales messages asking recipients to buy, buy, and buy.

If you are, know that it’s a common bad habit shared by many marketers. Businesses just getting into email marketing or those with lean budgets utilize this medium exclusively for promotional messaging.

The risk is turning off your audience and receiving a tidal wave of UNSUBSCRIBE return emails. Here are four ideas that will help convince your targets to keep opening your emails.

1. Email Newsletter – a classic tactic

Weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly e-newsletters are workhorses that allow you to send out a wide range of content and messages.

This versatile vehicle is ideal for articles, useful tips, recommendations, testimonials, event information—even product offers and specials, too. It’s a newsletter, so keep your readers informed of industry-wide developments.

If you have a particular area of expertise in your market, share that helpful information and insight in the form of feature articles.

2. Personal and Holiday eCards – everyone likes to be remembered

The opportunity to send your best wishes on email subscribers’ birthdays and anniversaries is too good to ignore. Holidays also are an acceptable time to send unsolicited emails. Thanksgiving wishes, Year-end Holiday messages, and other emails reflecting seasonal celebrations are ripe with openings for deepening your relationship via email.

Easy to develop and deploy, by including them in your message stream, your brand becomes more personable and more welcome in the inbox.

3. Triggered Follow-Ups – “license to sell”

FACT: triggered email can generate 10 times the revenue and more than 20 times the profit of random email campaigns.

Because these emails are sent out only when an action or an event occurs, they are more relevant and likely to be open and acted upon.

Examples include event reminders, bounce backs, thank-you for your order, and cart-abandonment follow-ups. Incorporate them into your digital arsenal and you’ll achieve a significant advance in ROI.

4. Edu-tainment –a lighter approach

Sharing useful tips and helpful hints, tutorials, and guides, humorous and fun items is a subtle, yet effective way to sell through service. These messages work even better if your email frequency is low. Plus, this category of email is often forwarded, thus expanding your potential.

What is the Value of Variety?

1. The average subscriber will delete emails that appear to be repetitive messaging.
2. Predictability has its positives, but an interruption to a pattern is a proven way to gain attention and engagement.
3. Too many “buy” messages can alienate list members to the point of unsubscribing.
4. Messages that are educational, informational, and entertaining add a dimension to the communications. They help position your brand as a trusted expert, informal advisor or street smart conspirator.
5. Although triggered email adds up to just a small percentage of email volume, it produces a disproportionately large quantity of revenue and profit.

With more and more companies that previously were heavy direct mail users migrating to email, it’s important to not lose sight of the differences of digital communications. There are many shared characteristics, it’s true, but the dynamics are distinctive.

Over time and testing, you can refine this aspect of your outbound email campaigns to find the sweet spot that delivers maximum return with economic efficiency.