Forrester have released a report predicting that individuals are are going to receive 9000 email marketing messages a year. That's is nearly 25 marketing emails a day.

Already today, email marketers are being advised to engage with their recipients rather than just trying to target them. If your recipients are going to be receiving that many emails everyday, engagement is going to be critical. Let's face it, most of those emails are not going to be opened.

Dela Quist wrote on the DMA's email marketing blog last week about recipients being "unemotionally subscribed". These are those users that make up the majority of your list - the ones that are not always opening and reading your emails. They stay subscribed preferring instead to ignore your emails because there might be a use for them another time. Unsubscribing now would mean the hassle of trying to find the website again when I actually want to read the email. I am defintely guilty of this - though likewise a subject line might temporarily sway me from locating the delete button immediately.

So how can you stand out from the pack and engage with your audience?

Before you can engage with your list, you first need to listen and understand your audience. Here are 3 ways to start engaging more with your list.

Use behavioural information from website tracking or through share-to-social type tools to add one level of understanding; as well as surveys, replies or other tools to obtain more specific responses.

Use techniques like Silverpop's send time optimisation feature to deliver your message at a time when the recipient is more likely to be in front of their computer.

Once you have a deeper understanding of your list, you are then able to split your list up into 4 categories and look at reports based on these groups.

1. "unemotionally subscribed" - see above

2. "engaged" - those who have opened, clicked etc

3. "engaged to buy" - showed a desire to purchase or have purchased

4. "engaged to influence" - those who are virally spreading your brand to others

More to come on this, as being engaged with your list is going to become more critical over time!

Further resources:

Webinar: Maximise Results with Engagement Marketing Technologies
Whitepaper: Engagement Marketing: Partnering With Your Customers for Success
Case Study: National Express

[image credit: quinn.anya]

Posted by Riaz Kanani at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At Silverpop's recent Masterclass, I was asked Do you have any design tips for B2B marketers? I thought this was worth postiing here as well.

The first is to remember that whether it is B2B or B2C marketing you’re in – the recipient is an individual and should be treated as such. You can do this in a number of ways such as using personalisation or personalised messaging that targets their preferences or responds to their behaviour in previous emails or online.

Also, think about the kind of emails you enjoy reading and consider putting some personality into your content, maybe even creating an editorial voice for your newsletters. In our creative study, we found that B2B recipients responded well to text based layouts, but they are increasingly busy with overloaded inboxes so you need to make sure the text is easy to scan in a few seconds using bullet points and/or bold or coloured text to highlight key points. This doesn’t mean you should stop using images, but use them wisely and keep them relevant and not in the top left corner. Consider coloured backgrounds rather than massive images if you are looking to make an impact and break up the email (Texas Instruments do this well).

Finally consider your mobile audience and include a quality text version of your email but also think about how people use their mobiles for email. I know that I often look at my inbox on the way in to work, deciding what messages I need to follow up on later and often deleting emails I don’t have time for or am not sure what the message is. I don’t have an iPhone, so it is the first 20-25 characters of the subject line as well as the first 3-5 sentences of text that allow me to make a decision. A link to an online version which is part of a website that takes ages to download doesn’t interest me and neither does an article snippet that goes through to a web site that renders the entire article as part of an entire webpage that I can barely read on my phone because of the navigation and other content. However, a compelling offer I can identify as interesting straight away will get saved for later and an article I can read whilst on the train will hold my attention (and keep me busy on the train) and mean I’ll have another look at the email and act on it when I get to my computer.

As you design your emails, think about your own behaviour on emails and ask friends, colleagues and user base what they like in the business emails they receive. Focus on ensuring the message is instantly clear (in the preview pane and without images) and making an impact in a few short seconds whatever the recipient’s platform.

Julie Joseph
eMarketing Strategy Consultant

(Image courtesy of daviddesign)

Posted by Riaz Kanani at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)