Email Marketing Tactics That Ensure Engagement

As everyone’s inboxes become piled high with emails; from newsletters, personal notes, work to-do’s, discounts from your favorite shops and more; it has become even more vital to ensure that your outbound marketing content is well-crafted, clear, concise and targeted!

 Without ensuring that these features exist within your outbound content, you have no guarantee that things will be received, read and engaged with. Really, your odds of obtaining engagement are slim to none unless you following the basic rules of offering clear and concise content to a targeted and appropriate segment.

When sending outbound content, always ensure that your call-to-action is obvious from the moment the reader opens the campaign. Without a clear call-to-action that is immediately known, your run the risk of having the reader lose interest quickly. Even if the reader is not interested in what you have to offer, if that offer is apparent from the get-go, then that reader is easily able to exit out of the campaign while a reader who is interested in the what you have to offer, knows they are ready to click through immediately.

Both of these sample campaigns below follow the rules of clear and concise content with a direct call-to-action. The area where these two campaigns differ is their target audiences. One campaign was sent to an entire database of nearly 15,000 contacts while the other campaign was sent to a small, targeted and intentionally-selected group of 66 people. Read on to look into how we can analyze the success of these two campaigns and then deduce a new rule for our company of only sending to smaller and targeted segments.

GT Health Section Ad Space

This campaign aims to sell ad space in one of Greeley Tribune’s several different publications. From the H2 text at the top stating ‘Advertise your Business….” to the call-to-action at the bottom stating ‘learn more’, it is obvious that the goal of this campaign is to sell ad space so that other businesses may advertise their own business within Greeley Tribune publications. There is sufficient information regarding submission deadlines and benefits of advertising with Greeley Tribune. The reader can gain more specifics on the costs of ad space by clicking the learn more call-to-action. This campaign is definitely clear and concise content.

This campaign was sent to a targeted and small segment of 66 contacts who live in the Greeley area and are associated with the healthcare/medical industry. By utilizing such a specific list of recipients, we eliminate our chances of being marked as spam, we increase the open and click rate and ensure that we are getting the RIGHT content to the RIGHT people.

GT - 99Cent Campaign

This campaign aims to sell subscriptions to the Greeley Tribune paper at a discounted rate. This campaign seems to have an even more clear and concise call to action and purpose. This campaign is also offering more of a discount than the health sections campaign. This campaign also is more visually appealing and eye-catching with the bright blue background and the clearly indicated (and cheap) yellow price tag of 99 cents. Again, we have another campaign that is following our rules of a clear and concise message.

The big difference in these campaigns is that this 99 cent special was sent to an entire database of 15,000 contacts. Many people assume ‘the more the merrier’…just send the campaign to as many people as possible and we ‘should’ get great engagement. That philosophy is WRONG! Within outbound content, the more is not the merrier. Instead, it is the better quality to fewer people that give us our ideal engagement.

Not only did we not obtain our ideal engagement with this 99 cent campaign, we also saw several unsubscribes as well as many contacts who actually marked us as spam! Getting marked as spam is a huge no-no in the marketing world! We absolutely do not want our customers to flag us as spam. If a customer is no longer interested in our services/product, then they can simply unsubscribe and this has no effect on the credibility of our company. When we get marked as spam, it is like the customer is saying that our company does not realize that we are sending the WRONG content to the WRONG person! This has a very negative effect on the credibility and sustainability of our company.

This graph is brief but is a great example of some statistics proving that quality is far more important than quantity, when it comes to outbound marketing. Don’t become one of the many annoying and spammy emails that are deleted, disregarded or marked as spam! Instead, send quality content to a small and specific segment. If you are afraid of not reaching enough people, you can always resend the campaign to another small and targeted segment. The issue is, you cannot un-send a campaign that has already polluted the inbox of thousands of customers so instead, send a campaign mulitple times to small and targeted segments to ensure you are still reaching the maximum number of customers. Always stay smart and stay clean!