May 2018 – TP Javeton WebNet

Make a good impression!

Email marketing may include sending email advertisements to a large distribution list, publishing and distributing a digital newsletter and sending informative emails with a soft sell approach to encourage recipients to make a purchase or visit a particular website. Whether you, as a business owner or marketer, opt to utilize one or all of these email marketing techniques, you will be faced with one specific dilemma; and that is writing the content which will appear in these emails. This particular phase is critical because these emails may be the first impression potential customers are receiving about your products and services.

Superior content will give potential customers a good first impression which may make them more likely to purchase your products or services; but the reverse is also true. Bad or poorly-written content might give them a not-so-good first impression and turn them off completely, thereby resulting in loss of business. That having been said, the goal of this article is to provide a few proven techniques which we hope will help you reap maximum benefit from the content you use in your email marketing campaign

Hiring a professional

Let’s start with hiring a professional writer, the importance of which cannot be stressed enough, to assist in composing content for your email marketing campaign. It is one of the most critical elements to the success of your campaign, and although you may be a decent writer or you may have a staff member who you think can do a good job creating content for your email marketing, unless you or your staff member is a professional writer by trade, the quality of work will likely not be of the same caliber as that of a professional. This can be very damaging especially if your competitors are hiring writers to create their content. Your emails will likely not be viewed as favorably as the emails written by professionals.

The content you decide to include in your email marketing efforts is largely a matter of personal preference, but there are some methods which have traditionally been more successful than others. The type of content which may be effective often includes informative articles, short useful tips, links to relevant websites, advertising for complementary products and even some subtle forms of advertising which are meant to persuade recipients of the email to either make a purchase or visit your website.

Product reviews & articles

Full length insightful articles which are likely to be of interest to the members of your email subscription list are an excellent idea for your email marketing campaign, because they will likely contain information which the recipients of your emails will appreciate. Additionally, these articles give you the opportunity to include information about your products or services in the copy of the email. This can be a subtle form of advertising when it encourages your list recipients to purchase a product/service and/or visit the website without actually asking recipients to do so.

Short product reviews can also be very useful and helpful when you include them in your email marketing campaign. These reviews can help to attract a great deal of attention, especially when the reviews focus on the products you offer and provide favorable reviews for these products. This type of information can either be subjective in nature or can remain objective by simply specifying certain features of the products and offering other concrete pieces of information as opposed to opinions of those products.

Ads – direct or subtle?

Advertising is often a very important part of an email marketing campaign and may either be direct or indirect in nature. Direct advertising might include banner ads or other graphical advertisements which encourage website visitors to click through the link to reach either your website or a sponsor’s website. Indirect advertising may apply to content in the copy of featured articles which subtly encourage visitors to make a purchase or visit your website. The indirect marketing in an email marketing campaign is usually supportive of the products or services you offer while direct marketing will likely promote products and services offered by sponsors who paid to receive advertising space on the email. Email recipients are usually well aware that these graphics are part of an advertisement and will choose to click on such links when they have an interest in the products or services being offered.

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Know the distinctions!

Typical Web users receive tons of emails encouraging them to purchase certain products or visit specific websites owned or managed by the email senders or merchants with whom they are affiliated; and while these emails arrive in inboxes of unsuspecting web users each day, most of them pay very little attention to such emails. This is because emails which are blatant advertisements are often viewed as spam, and most Web users have very little tolerance for spam; but it is very important to understand the distinction between these two types of communication.

One distinction is the reaction of recipients, which is to say that reactions to spam tend to range from simply ignoring such emails and having the email addresses blocked from sending future communications, to reporting such emails to their Internet service providers (ISPs) for further investigation. We realize many Web marketers have difficulty keeping their email marketing subtle and, as such, this article will provide some information which we hope will be useful in determining how email marketing can be kept subtle so it is not viewed as spam.

Criteria for subtlety

Among the most important criteria for ensuring your email marketing is done in as subtle a manner as possible and not be viewed as spam is to provide something of quality to your recipients. This thing of quality may consist of insightful articles, interesting quizzes or other useful facts which members of the target audience are likely to find useful, if not valuable.

The simple fact is when email recipients realize that an email they received is offering them something worthwhile such as knowledge or information about a particular niche subject they are much more likely to spend some time reviewing the email and therefore will not likely consider the email to be spam. In addition to using the creation of something qualitative to convince recipients that the email is not spam, business owners can also take advantage of qualitative content to provide subtle advertising which may include product references in the articles or links to his/her website throughout the email.

Avoid outrageous claims

Avoiding language which makes outrageous claims can also help to keep advertising quite subtle since the opposite – using certain superlatives and adjectives of greatness with which to describe specific products – is likely to be viewed as blatant advertising. When such language is used, it is highly unlikely that email recipients will believe there is validity in anything contained within the email because they will believe the entire email is simply one big advertisement for the senders’ products or services.

One method proven to be most effective in keeping advertisements subtle when running email marketing campaigns is to only send your email(s) to those who are likely to be extremely interested in your products and services. This is important because when email recipients receive an email that does not reflect their interests in any manner or form, they are not likely to take the email seriously and may very well view such email(s) as a blatant advertisement or spam.

Blatant advertisement is taboo

However, when emails are sent only to those who share a common interest the email seems more personalized and therefore, those email recipients are not likely to view every product reference as a blatant advertisement since they understand there is sometimes a need to mention products or services in emails of high quality content which are sent legitimately.

Finally email marketing is considered subtle – and remains so – when the content of campaign emails is written as though it is not coming directly from the business owner. In other words, the copy might discuss products and services as though they are being offered by a third party. This method makes the advertising seem more subtle because it does not appear to come directly from the business owner.

Be minful of perceptions

Of course, business owners can help to ensure their email marketing efforts are not viewed as blatant advertisements by keeping reference to their own website to an absolute minimum, while being mindful of the fact that most Web users often view links from one website to another strictly as advertisements. For this reason it might be advisable for business owners who are promoting products/services via an email campaign to keep links to a minimum and to carefully weave these links into even the most quite benign copy.

The links should be provided as though they were only included to provide readers with an opportunity to learn more about certain products/services and not as a way to encourage them to purchase these products/services. It might be worthwhile for business owners to consider hiring a writer with this type of skill and experience to ensure the copy conveys desired message, message formats and message intent which should therefore convey the desired effect to the email recipients.

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