Content and email marketing… everything you need to know

Things you need to ask yourself when developing content include:

• How can you make your clients’ life easier? What problems can you solve for them with your content?
• What can you teach them?
• Why should they choose your product or service? What makes it different to your competition?

Email marketing can reveal a lot about which campaigns are working for your business and why. By measuring sign-ups and open and click rates, you can follow what your clients are most interested in, which is a super useful tool.

So, to get you started, here are a few tips on how to make the most out of your email marketing.

Know how to talk to your audience
To do this, you must know who your audience is, define your target audience and compare this with a compiled client/customer list of email marketing sign-ups. Are you talking to the right people? How can you tailor your message to suit their specific needs or fix a certain problem?

Quality over quantity

We’re strong believers of this. You don’t want to overload people with useless information. You also don’t want to say you’ll send fortnightly emails, only to have them land in their inbox daily. Nobody likes a spammer, right? But, consistency is key here. Pick a frequency that you know you can maintain from a content and resource perspective, and stick to it. The goal is to build trust, and eventually, connection and loyalty.

Focus on your core values
Tell your brand story. Your marketing strategy should revolve around branding and the values your company shares. This gives the audience an idea of who you are, what you’re about and makes it easier for clients to build a connection. Maybe they need a reminder of who you are and why they liked you so much to sign up in the first place.

Get Whitelisted
You don’t want to put in all the hard work on creating great campaigns and content, building your email list and distributing them, only to have them land in the spam folder. While most reputable email service providers work hard to make sure that your emails aren’t blocked, the message may still end up in spam. Getting whitelisted is the most effective way to ensure that your emails are reaching your clients.

Your goal is to be added to the recipient’s address book, and you can do this by giving instructions on how to do just that, at the top of your email, especially in the first “thank you for signing up” email.

Call-to-action
Whether it’s a new product or service you’re launching, an event, or a new blog post. For your email marketing to be effective, make sure it has a call-to-action: to RSVP, to be directed to the blog post or to make contact about a new package etc. Whatever it is, you need to offer value to your client list for them to be interested.

You do this through quality emails which may feature a balance of friendly notes, a pitch about a new offer and posts they may have missed on social media channels. Getting this balance right is important, you don’t just want to be selling or talking at your clients. Remember, the whole idea of email marketing is to strengthen connections and build relationships, which will then translate to sales.

Provide valuable resources
Offering value, as we’ve said above, is important. This will vary depending on your industry and business, but it may suit to offer free interactive white papers or eBooks and free downloads, mixed with update lists on product/service updates and new releases.

Email marketing is all about setting expectations and it’s your job to set them. Stay consistent, have strong call-to-action elements, and build trust, connection and loyalty from your client list. Focus on your branding and core values, and how you’re communicating them.

And if you’ve just read this post and feel like you want to know more about email marketing, then do the sensible thing and talk to a professional. You can drop us a line at hey@wildandfree.com.au.