Author: Patrick Griffin

Patrick Griffin has been marketing online for 15 years. He's a serial entrepreneur and an avid email and content marketing enthusiast with a background in publishing and journalism, including a UK Press Award.

Never Send An Email When You Have Nothing To Say

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Marketing email tips

Marketing email tips: There is only one thing worse than failing to communicate with your subscribers…and that is talking to them too much.

So here is one of my golden rules which you ignore at your peril:

  • Never, ever, send out an email to your list when you don’t have something useful to communicate.

This can be a mistake if you commit to send out weekly (or heaven forbid daily) emails to your subscribers so that takes us on to our second golden rule:

  • Never make promises that you are unable to keep.

So, therefore, don’t ever promise to send a weekly newsletter unless you know, for absolute certain, that you will have enough information to provide that content.

Your subscribers are fickle. Just because they have signed up does not mean they are yours for life. Far from it. It is good to assume that every time you send an email you may potentially lose a segment of your list – those that don’t like what you have to say and who can be bothered to hit the ‘unsubscribe’ button.

So even if you have written an email don’t automatically send it.

Read over it first and ask yourself this question: “Does this email contain useful information which would be of value to my subscribers?”

If the answer is “no” then don’t send it. Either rewrite it so that it does contain some information of value or just don’t send it at all.

 

Email Subscribers Value Information Especially Insider Information

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Subscribers Value Information

I recently watched a television program about an upmarket London department store and the way sales staff treated their highest spending clients. Learn how email subscribers value information.

The part that stood out for me was that the top sales people had their own lists of clients and they would contact them whenever something new came into the shop.

Now the point is that they did not contact just when any old stock item was updated, but when something they knew their clients would like came into the store.

The upshot was that the customers loved to be “in the know” with the very latest information and many of them could not wait to come into the store and buy the items which were recommended to them.

This can work brilliantly with your email marketing campaigns too.

For the very best chance of getting the best results you will need to:

  • know exactly what your subscribers want to know
  • have timely, up to date information that your subscribers value
  • be seen as authoritative and, above all, trusted by your subscribers and
  • have goods or services that you can recommend and sell to your list.

Tell people what’s new, what they will love and where they can get it and use your RocketResponder account to do just that.

A Quick Example Of A Reconfirm Email

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Example Of A Reconfirm Email

We have already seen why it might be a good idea to give your RocketResponder list an opportunity to unsubscribe from your list from time to time. Let us now take a look at an example of a reconfirm email.

Examples of where this may be useful include:

  • if you change the way you want to communicate with your list – eg from mainly blog updates to marketing-type emails
  • if you have just imported a list from elsewhere
  • if your list is very old
  • if you have not really communicated with your list for a long period of time

Just turning up in their inbox in these circumstances could lead to a lot of unsubscribes and, even worse, spam complaints.

The unsubscribes are more or a less a given, they will happen, so by sending out an email giving your subscribers an option of what action to take means you can manage the unsubscribes better and hopefully totally avoid the spam complaints.

So this is what you might say. I will use the example where I have not communicated with the list for a long time and where I want to send different types of email than before:

Hi [firstname],

It is [name] here from [company or website] and I will totally understand if you have totally forgotten who I am.

However you did sign up to receive emails from me and I am going to start sending them at long last.

I used to just email you when I updated my blog, something I have badly neglected in recent months, but now I want to include sending some marketing tips and suggestions I think you would find really useful.

However I can understand that you might not want any more emails at all so if you click the big “unsubscribe” link below then you will be immediately removed from this list.

If you want to stay then I look forward to us getting to know each other better in the weeks and months ahead.”

You can see that it is short and to the point.

If you do decide to do this then keep your email short also but use your own wording so that it is personal and reflects your writing style and personality.

You Must Know What Your Audience Wants

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Know What Your Audience Wants

I used to work on a busy newsdesk at a national newspaper and it is no exaggeration to say that many hundreds, of not thousands of emails would come in every day. You must know what your audience wants or you won’t get them to take the correct action.

It was a full time job in itself just reading through all the information which came through the newsroom each day to find ones we would want to follow up for publication.

The fact is that only a tiny percentage of the information which poured into the newsroom ever got to come out of the other side as an article in the next day’s publication – the rest was just deleted.

But at least everything got read before it got deleted right? Wrong.

There were not enough hours in the day to read everything so this is what would typically happen:

  • not a look in – some people or organizations who had gained a reputation of sending absolute rubbish would have their emails immediately deleted – unread.
  • you’ve got to be joking – some emails were just too long and boring to read and as a result, they did not get read at all. If the email went on for six or seven pages and looked boring then it would not even get read. Yes we may have missed some good stories by ignoring this source of content but that is what happened.
  • you have ten seconds starting from now – If I didn’t know who an email was from then I would look at it…for all of about ten seconds (or less) Basically if the first paragraph didn’t grab my attention then I stopped reading and moved on to the next one.
  • I know you and I like you – Some people sent in emails that were timely, relevant, interesting and right up our street. These were always given the most attention as they were most likely to contain material we could use as content for the next day’s paper.
  • Please stop annoying me – At the opposite end of the spectrum were emails from PR companies which were nothing short of marketing drivel. You could judge the levels of desperation by the amount of times they would send the same email and follow them up with maddening phone calls.

You don’t have to work for a newspaper to learn lessons from these examples because they can apply to anyone who sends an email to anyone ever.

Basically know what your audience wants and send emails that will actually want to read. You won’t get it right all the time but if around eight out of ten of your emails are on target then you should be doing very well indeed.