Is Your Email Marketing Socially Inept?

Is your email awkward?  Is it shy around other emails?  Does it just stand in the corner wearing a lime-green leisure suit and go home alone at the end of the night?  Is it constantly overlooked for trendier, cooler emails?  Well, I’m sorry to tell you, your email marketing is probably socially inept.

So you might think that I’m calling attention to the look of your email marketing.  I’m not.  Although how your email marketing presents itself is important, it is not the number one reason most email marketing falls short of success.  What is most important is content.

Your content must be valuable to the recipient; valuable enough so they want to share that content with others.  The content should be useful today as well as a month from now.  You should be building a valuable library for your clients of knowledge that helps them make a decision to use or continue to use your products and services.

It’s okay to speak to your audience naturally.  Your content does not have to be bland business speak and technical mumbo jumbo.  Know your audience, understand their wants and needs, and find a way to convey your expertise and your ability to help.  If you really help them with a great product and service, they will tell others about your email newsletters.  They will forward them and they will post links to them on their social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

This can be one of the most powerful ways to make your email marketing newsletters viral so they can take on a life of their own.  Remember, email is really a one-to-one medium and should be thought of and written with that in mind.  Also, remember that one size does not fit all.  Use list segmentation to create lists by the recipients’ preferences.  Ask them what they want and give it to them.

Make it easy for your recipients to forward your email and to post them to social networks with a simple click of integrated icons (like the ones below).  Keep an archive of past issues at a separate domain so you create a site that will not only drive traffic to your website but also increase your search engine rankings with additional inbound links.