The best email marketing you’ll ever do is helping people. When people think of email marketing, they think of promotions. Sale offers, special deals, new product announcements and such. However, such forms of email marketing only make people buy things and services. It will not help them use those to make them more succesful in life.
Helping people use your products or services should be paramount though. It should be part of all your marketing efforts, and especially email marketing. I’ll explain a few reasons below, you should be able to make up your own other reasons.
The best email marketing you’ll ever do – Being supportive = winning customer for life
Customers that have bought a product or service from your company will want to get the most out of it. They want to know how to use it, and manuals won’t cut it. Using something is one thing, getting the most out of it is a lot better. How can you support those customers? Give inspiration, give tips, give insight, give everything you got. Share what you have learned yourself while using it. Don’t use your own service? Time to start, now. Only by using something will you learn its inner workings, its powers and its quirks.
You will be able to improve it along the way, both by your own team’s feedback as well as that from the customer. If you show you care about how succesful the customer is with it, they will care about the product.
When you are supportive of customers with training, use cases and more they will understand you mean business. They will feel comfortable using your service and talking about it, too (more on that later). The best email marketing in this case is education and support through email marketing. It’s an excellent way to deliver videos, blog posts and other content that will open up new possibilities and inspire people.
Remember: quality matters in email marketing. If you take care of every little detail, it will show in the end result. Your email campaigns will be appreciated even more! If a commercial email contains valuable content for me, like tips, a link to a training video or such, it will live in my inbox forever. Email is ‘sticky’ as it is already compared to social media, but make it indispensable for the receiver and it will be revisited again and again, months after sending it.
The best email marketing you’ll ever do – A consistent message that informs and inspires
In modern multichannel marketing, email marketing should not stand alone. Other channels should support it, while still showing consistency. People don’t want a gazillion channels with just as many messages. They want one brand, one message. They don’t care about channels or campaigns or ROI. Coordination of your messages is just as important as the principle of helping people. It will prevent uncertainty and doubt: people will be informed correctly. If done well, they will be inspired to do great things. People might become product experts themselves and help others too, for free! A great example of this is Apple products. Apple is not present on social media, but their army of Apple fans will make sure any questions posted will be handled swiftly and correctly.
The best email marketing you’ll ever do – Request a lot of feedback, often
Do you know how your clients are using your service? Are they succesful with it? Do they have improvements? Are they happy about your support, general communications and such? If any of those questions are answered with a ‘no’, it is time to take action. Get feedback on anything and everything. It will provide invaluable insight into how people use your service or product. Assumptions are fatal: unless you know, you can’t take affirmative action.
Requesting feedback would mean for your company to do something with it: it would be expected by clients. Great! Followup actions are in order and a tighter relationship can be built. If you don’t have a recurring survey out with just a few questions, you are in the dark about client happiness and knowledge. The best email marketing would include that recurring survey with a nice followup via email which included the answers given by a respondent and a little ‘Thank you!’ for completing the survey. It’s the little things that count. Being thankful is important in general: remember the mission for 2013.
There you go: just three reasons to be helpful through email marketing. I’m sure you can come up with more. Good luck!
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ExactTarget revenue figures have been published for Q1 2013 a few days ago. Reported results for the first quarter are a loss of f $11.6 million or $0.17 per share. Last year, the numbers were $4.7 million or $0.32 per share.
