The Lob, the Jam!: How Email Marketing Finishes the Alley-Oop
The alley-oop is the most famous play in basketball. It requires two players — one to toss the ball up and another to jump up, catch it in the air, and dunk it.
Email marketing usually comes at the later stages of the buying cycle. By this point, a prospective customer has discovered your business, browsed your content, and given you his contact information.
To compare this to an alley-oop, the ball is already in the air, and now the other player just has to finish the deal.
The Set Up
The set up to email marketing is everything that happens beforehand. Although they don’t just stop on a dime, practices like SEO, social media marketing, and PPC help you get to this point.
The problem is that these practices also aren’t effective in terms of getting prospective customers to buy your products. The research is in favor of email marketing in this respect.
The Dunk
Finishing the alley-oop isn’t easy. You need to work on your timing, athleticism, and teamwork. Likewise, crafting a good email campaign takes time. Here are some things that can help:
Create an email schedule
It’s common for businesses to send marketing emails too frequently. In this case, “better safe than sorry” usually means sending less messages.
A recent Huffington Post article explains what happens otherwise. According to the article, if you don’t want to annoy subscribers, then you should develop an email schedule:
“You don’t want to come across as annoying. Develop a schedule for sending the emails to your readers. Do not send too many emails at a time so as to become a nuisance and do not leave too much space between emails or your readers will forget and lose interest in you. You can send emails, daily, weekly or biweekly. Monthly at most.”
An appropriate schedule will obviously vary from business to business. The important thing is that there’s logic behind your marketing process.
Focus on Adding Value
A great way of restricting the amount of messages you send is focusing on quality. Set a high bar and you won’t ever have to worry about your email frequency.
Of course, the real benefit here is that customers will associate your brand with good quality. They’ll actually look forward to your emails if they know there’s value there.
Personalize Your Messages
Personalization is perhaps the most effective tactic in regard to email marketing. Just including a subscriber’s name can make a big impact.
This Customer Think article suggests that when you don’t personalize your messages, users become aware that they’re receiving marketing content:
“Consider how many times you’ve opened up an email to find your name in a conspicuously different font or color than the rest of the text, or read something like “Hello, there.” As a marketer, you’ve likely seen right through these tactics, but know that you aren’t the only one. Today’s marketing world is striving to deliver more customized experiences to consumers in an attempt to produce higher results.”
There are lots of ways to personalize your emails. In addition to addressing someone by name, you can also mention their past orders and suggest specific content based on their interests.
The reason why failing to personalize your messages is such a crime is because it’s so easy. Many services make it simple to add elements of personalization to your emails. If you don’t know how to, then just ask.
There’s a lot going on in online marketing, and it all takes users to the end of the buying process. To end it successfully, many businesses turn to email marketing. Like dunking a basketball, it’s a good way to make sure your leads convert.