the goose

Email gets a bad wrap.  Spam clogging up inboxs and untold hours of lost productivity.  Viagra and free visa’s to the US all go towards making it a touchy subject.  However, if email can elect an American president, I can’t afford to ignore it for developing a relationship with our customers.

Checking my own inbox, the oldest email newsletter I’m subscribed to goes back almost 10 years.  It is a technology newletter to do with MS Outlook, something I don’t work on anymore, but I stay subscribed in case some day I need it.  That is one hell of a relationship.

Nothing.  Not twitter, not Facebook or anything else comes close in turns of accessability and longevity.  Granted the social networks have only been around for a few years, but email is the original social network and eveyone online is plugged into it.

It is so powerful in fact, that infomarketers have taken it to their heart.  They practice alchemy on their ‘lists’ (aka: leads) until the parlay them into pure gold.  In a way, it is a cheap trick, but my own experience with email has taught me that you can’t really afford to not have an email marketing strategy.

So here is the challenge:  How can I have an email marketing strategy that doesn’t suck?

This is what I’ve figured out so far.

Copy :  When we first set up our email subscriptions using Aweber, we lashed in a set of follow up emails, scheduled to go out to memebers of the list on different dates over the space of six months. Then we revisited the emails several weeks letter.  Priscilla let loose her considerable copywriting expertise and transformed the copy to match our brand.  We cut the length of content down (to 1 or 2 paragraphs) and dialled up the punchy langauge.  The result was evident within weeks.  We had never really had many unsubscribes but now people were actually starting to email us back with comments.

Training: There are a bucket of online training courses out there.  Most of them look like ‘get rich quick’ schemes.  I wouldn’t be put off by this.  Shell out the $99, buy one and pick up a few tricks.  Just don’t be surprised if your are still poor after reading them.  Its the implementation which hardly anyone ever implements.

Sprinkle interaction:  Rather than having a passive email list, we’ve started to try and get our guys to interact with us in some way.  We ask them to follow us on twitter, call in to test their voice on our Test my voice service.  The difference started to show up when talking over the phone.

Less is more:  Paring down the copy has meant the use of more bullet points and lots of PS’s.  There is a bunch of tacky advice out there on how to use the tricks of the trade to maximise your email interaction.  Everything from using calls to action to adding PS’s in every mail.  The problem is – everyone uses them.  Our brand a permits  little mild swearing and questionable innuendo (our most popular email, above, is entitled “How to get ahead in voiceovers without doing ‘favours’”).

Email warms up cold leads to warm prospects and provides an automated way to build relationships.  Done without style, it irks.  Done with a little balls – it seems to be doing us some favours.  We don’t use templates and we make sure one-click unsubscibe links are there for the world to see.

So why does it work?  Well here is my theory.  People only buy when the trust.  Trust is an emotion.  To build up that feeling of trust you need time.  Brands provide instant trust but we have to assume that we’re not known from a bar of soap.  It is pretty much hopeless to build up trust in the 7 seconds it takes someone to scan our web page.   Looking good enough to earn their email address however, means we can ‘touch’ them over and over again without having to spend man hours.  Everyone knows they are on an automated list but they can’t help it.  Its like looking at a cute little teddy bear with a missing eye.  We all know its just stuffing and cloth but we can’t help but empathise.  The same goes for email campaigns.  Despite the fact we know logically it’s automatically generated – our emotions can’t differentiate and it starts to build familiarity and trust.  Its fairly common for me to hear on the phone now I’ve been getting your emails, they are great’.  These leads are a LOT warmer and convert way easier.

Just a little footnote here.  I’ve been reading some other blogs recently and I’m kind of getting a little intimidated by the quality that is out there.  If you have read this far – thanks for putting up with the lack of research and befuddled thought patterns.  Now go read about email marketing somewhere more reputable for god’s sake.