If you work in marketing, then you have repeatedly encountered the problem of creating a reason to reach out to a client. Writing all the time about new products, discounts, and promo codes on any occasion? Boring. In this article I’ll show you an example of emails that give promo codes on and off, which is already even a little annoying. Besides, constant promotions/promo-codes devalue their essence. For example, the client sees for five months in a row the next “most grand closing” promotion and realizes that the next month will be the same.
So what do you do if you don’t have an idea for an occasion and how do you time the biggest infomercials to your business niche? Sharing insights in the article.
Step 1: Think like a customer
As a general rule, every business has a portrait of the audience that is its customer. If for some reason you don’t, it’s time to make one. Ideally, you need to form clear answers to questions such as:
- What is the age of my audience;
- What gender;
- What level of education;
- What marital status;
- What place of residence;
- What income.
There can be many more questions, depending on the type of business and niche. The more questions the better, because this way in the future you can form clear segments and understand their needs better than others. For example, a pet store still needs to segment customers by the types of animals they own. It is logical to assume that sending the owner of the cat information about the action on dog food, you can not count on the conversion.
To make it clearer, let’s take the same pet products niche and form the pool of questions needed to create customer groups. In this niche we do not care what gender/age or marital status customers have. The questions that are important to us are:
- What kind of animal does he/she own?
- does he have only one animal, or several different ones?
- type of owner: typical pet owner, charity, breeders, veterinary clinics.
- Income level (important if the pet store has its own grooming salon or high-end products).
How do you find out the answers to these questions? You can use registration forms, pop-ups, surveys. You can find out your income level by finding out what kind of animal the customer has. For example, a spitz owner is likely to need grooming services.
Based on the answers to these questions, you can form several customer segments that definitely need to prepare different emails.
Step 2. Querying the Internet
Now it is necessary to understand, but how to find a reason to write? Again, constant promotions and coupons don’t work and devalue the service.
- Territoriality: It is best to choose a holiday of your country or world holidays, otherwise you can make a cool newsletter on the day of the dead in Mexico and get a negative response in Ukraine;
- Is the occasion appropriate for the niche. The closest at the moment is Halloween (I hope you appreciated how I prepared myself and chose the cover for the article with pumpkins for the atmosphere). Such an infomercial would suit everyone as a reason to give a promo code or run a promotion, it’s true. But how do you apply this event to deliver something to the reader and write a full-fledged, interesting letter? So it turns out that not every business needs to be tied to a major infomercial, but to look at something else from the calendar. That, by the way, is how you stand out from the crowd of the same topics and emoji.
Step 3. Relevance
Separately want to talk about such a characteristic of content as relevance. You have decided on an infopod and you know your audience. The most important thing is that this occasion was relevant. If you tied a meme or a joke to the occasion, think about whether the audience will understand it, whether you’re not offending someone. Agree, a mailing from a private expensive clinic with the theme “And if the squid game had our doctors on duty, everyone would have survived” is not very appropriate.
It’s better to think ahead and avoid ambiguous statements, because the letter is the company’s direct speech. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a promotional mailing or a personal letter from a manager to a client.
Conclusion
You may get the impression that I urge you not to sell products in mailing lists. Of course you do, but do it wisely. In addition to simply offering your store’s products or services, you need to explain why you are the best, to interest and attract the customer’s attention.
Yes, it’s more difficult, but try to go to your mailbox and compare: how many companies write to you with the usual offers of goods, and how many give interesting information and motivate to open the letter?