What’s the difference between spam and a successful email blast?
If we go by the actual definition, it’s that spam is both harmful and unsolicited. It’s intended to deceive, harm, or victimize its recipient in some way, shape, or form. If, however, you were to ask the average user?
The difference between a successful blast and a message that gets relegated to the trash or spam folder is that the former is relevant to its recipient. That’s the secret.
We’re all awash in a sea of emails. Our inboxes are flooded with everything from promotional messages to spam to business correspondence to personal messages.
Per Statista, 55 percent of all email messages sent in September 2019 were junk. Factor in all the other brands vying for attention, and it’s incredibly easy to get lost in the noise.
And if your emails aren’t perfectly tailored to the interests of the recipients, they will. And that’s precisely where most email marketing campaigns fall apart. They aren’t compelling enough, nor do they provide enough value to their recipients.
There may be several reasons for this.
A Bad Subject Line
An email’s subject line is the first impression it makes on its audience. Yet too often, businesses blunder forward with subject lines that are too long, too spammy, or simply boring.
Avoid special characters, overuse of caps and punctuation, and writing a subject line that’s too long.
Per Campaign Monitor, the ideal subject line length is around 41 characters and 7 words long. It’s also advisable that you personalize your subject lines, and if you’re sending out a time-sensitive blast, be sure they convey some sense of urgency.
You should also be sure to include an email preheader, either through HTML/CSS or email software. This preheader appears as a sort of ‘preview’ in a recipient’s inbox, and should ideally work in tandem with your subject line. Think of it as sort of a follow-up, or as your email’s meta description.
No Mailing List Segmentation
Perhaps the biggest mistake marketers make with email is they fail to understand their audience. They simply send out their email blasts to one massive mailing list rather than segmenting their lists based on demographics and interests. This is a problem.
Your first step here is to identify your target market. Figure as many details as you can about your ideal customer, working from post-purchase surveys, studying your own and competitor’s social media feeds, and collecting data based on your sales. Create a few audience profiles from this data, then use those to inform your content creation.
From there, you’ll want to segment your mailing list a few ways:
- By user preference. Some people might want entertainment, others might want informative newsletters, and still, others might want information on sales and the like.
- By content type. Video, infographics, simple text, etc.
- By location.
- By purchase history.
Unsolicited Emails
The core purpose of email marketing is not to bring in more leads. It’s not to create brand awareness or make new sales. It’s to strengthen your business’s relationship with its existing customers. With that in mind, make it easy for email recipients to subscribe to or unsubscribe from any mailing lists you maintain, both through a landing page on your website and through the emails themselves.
Additionally, all email lists should use double opt-in, requiring prospective recipients to confirm that they wish to sign up twice.
Sending Better Email
The vast majority of emails your customers receive are treated as white noise at best. By understanding what they want to see and serving it to them in a manner they can control, you can leverage email for its intended purpose. And in so doing, you can overcome the constant tide of spam and connect with your audience in a much deeper way.
