Email Marketing Mistake #10: Lack of Personality, Positioning and Proposition

One of the biggest mistakes I see with company email programs is the lack of differentiation, personality and a clear value proposition. I call these the "Three Ps" that form a core foundation of your email program:

• Proposition (Value). What value does your email program provide for your customers/subscribers?
• Positioning. How does it differ from your competitors?
• Personality. What kind of image and tone do your emails convey?

The Value Proposition
A traditional value proposition is basically a statement that summarizes why a consumer/company should purchase or use your product or service. Its core elements are the value your offerings provide and problems they solve.

Your email program or newsletter needs a similar value proposition. In essence, you must answer the question: Why should I subscribe to your emails, and what value will I receive?

If you are a retailer, for example, your email value proposition might be:

• Learn about sales or new products before non-subscribers
• We do the work for you by presenting personalized recommendations
• We help you make more informed decisions through buying tips, education, etc.

Your email value proposition will be driven by your company's core value proposition and should directly reflect and support it.

Knowing your value proposition will help you accurately promote your email program and choose copy or offers that reinforce it in your messages. Also, make sure your value proposition is clearly reflected and conveyed in your opt-in forms, preference center and welcome messages.

If you don't know what the core role and value of your email program is, your readers won't, either.

Positioning
In their seminal book on positioning, "The New Positioning: The Latest on the World's #1 Business Strategy," Al Ries and Jack Trout write, "Positioning is essentially an 'against' strategy. That is, you normally position your company or brand against another."

Once you've established your email's value proposition, you have to make sure your email program expresses it through positioning, which helps you distinguish your email program from your competitors.

As examples, these three email newsletters, all of which cover email marketing, come to mind:

• MarketingSherpa. MarketingSherpa focuses on providing marketing best practices based on a combination of case studies and research. Marketers value the real-life examples from their fellow marketers.
• Magilla Marketing. Ken Magill of Magilla Marketing (Direct), takes a traditional journalism approach by breaking industry news and executive moves, covering email industry insider gossip and "stupid" actions. People anxiously read his newsletter, usually hoping they aren't mentioned.
• Email Insider. MediaPost's Email Insider newsletters are written by industry "experts" (including yours truly) and provide a mixture of best practices, trends and viewpoints. A key value is the variety of ideas and opinions and discussion that ensue.

Though all three cover email marketing, they follow the industry in different ways. No marketer could confuse one newsletter with another. Each clearly conveys a different value proposition.

Now that people's inboxes are getting harder to penetrate, if your email doesn't differentiate itself clearly from competitive offerings, you will have a tough time growing and retaining subscribers.

All the elements you use in your email program will support your positioning:

• Name. Suppose your newsletter promotes one great daily travel deal scoured from across the Web. Does your name convey that? "Travel News" says nothing, but "Your Daily Getaway Deal" tells readers how often the email comes (daily), your market (travel) and your value prop (bargain-hunting). Even "Your" makes the email slightly more personal without using specific personal information.
• Email design. A short daily newsletter should package key content on one screen. A more in-depth newsletter with a mix of editorial content would design for navigation to various points in the message, including destinations "below the fold," or in the bottom half of the message.
• Graphics and colors. Your corporate brand and identity will drive your choices, but beyond that, do you use imagery and color to create an identifiable spot in your subscribers mind?
• Personality. Your newsletter should have a distinctive voice, attitude or a point of view to help you stand out. See the next section to learn more.

Personality
Think about the emails that you subscribe to. Which newsletters do you anticipate, open as soon as they arrive and value the most? I'll bet you that most of them have distinctive personalities.

This is often a tough challenge for corporate newsletters, because many people (the CEO, your boss, the legal department, the sales manager) might have their hands in the mix. Still, even the most conservative institutional publications can cultivate a personality.

Personality is a mix of positioning, your value proposition, your company's culture, your newsletter or email goals, and a reflection of who you understand your readers to be. You express it through the offers you send or the news you report, your design and choice of images and mostly through your writing style, tone and voice.

Personality is embodied and conveyed through people. Think of "The Motley Fool" with its tagline of "To Educate, Amuse & Enrich," which is embodied in the irreverent and humorous personality of the two co-founders and expressed via company logo and approach to stock investing tips. The MarketingSherpa newsletters mentioned above reflect founder Anne Holland's personality, and Magilla Marketing is a direct reflection of Ken Magill's personality.

Give your emails a personal voice, using an editor or executive from your company. Remember that email is a conversation between you and your subscribers. Conversations are more interesting than lectures; so, cultivate a personal, other-oriented approach (use "you" far more often than "I" or "we") and a tone that reflects natural speech. Read your copy out loud as you proof it. The ear often picks up awkward construction better than the eye.

A Final Thought
Defining the value proposition, positioning and personality of your own email program does take time, but it is essential work if you want to create emails that readers will anticipate and engage with.