Writing effective automated emails is an essential element in any behavioral marketing campaign. They carry a kind of quasi-intimate connotation with your clients. One that surmounts many of the usual obstacles one would encounter during such an entrepreneurial adventure. Content targeting is usually going to be many times more effective than many other advertising outlets. This is because of the already established level of trust between you and the recipient. They gave you their email addresses, and you must treat access to their inboxes as a great privilege. Your customer’s attention is the life blood of your business, and crowding it with anything inconsequential is bound to direct it elsewhere.

So what can you do to keep from abusing this near-sacred trust that your contact list has afforded you?

The Purpose of Emails in Target Marketing

You have to understand your client’s interests, and how your business fits into them. What exactly brought them within the sphere of your influence? You need to determine this all-important information, and continue to provide content which matches those criteria.

In the past, this kind of data would be available only through random sampling and surveys. Today however, metric tracking software, such as Ashop’s ecommerce interface, will allow you to learn a great deal about your clientele without having to use any such intrusive methods.

So before you ever start crafting an email, it’s important to answer 2 questions:

1.       What does your mailing list want, expect, and gain from your business?
2.       What do you hope to accomplish with your email?

The first question is the difficult one. Basically, you’ll need to analyze your metrics, hypothesize, test, and draw conclusions. Where is the traffic originating from? What devices are they using? How long are they spending on individual pages of your site? Which pages are they spending the most time on? The more specific you can get with your hypothesis, the better your testing will be. From there, you’ll be able to draw useful conclusions, and in turn paint a much more 3-dimensional your picture of the consumer.

To conduct adequate tests, write a few different email drafts designed to check your hypotheses. Send different versions out to different contacts on your list, and record the results. This is called multivariate testing, and it’s an extremely useful tool in your content targeting arsenal.

Learning about customer intent is not always an easy endeavor, but it is always a worthwhile investment of time.

The second question should be far easier to answer. There are usually 3 major reasons for writing targeted advertising emails:

1.       To drive traffic to your site. More specifically, to your landing page, so that you can gain conversions.
2.       To advertise a new product or service. It makes sense to advertise to a client who’s seen fit to purchase from you in the past. To put it in old-school terms, it’s like using a solid sales lead, versus starting from scratch and cold calling.
3.       To build a business/client relationship. In an ideal world, all of your customers would be friends. So treat them in a neighborly manner, and you’ll see that affability pays big dividends.

Once you’ve figured out why you’re doing what you’re doing, a course of action becomes much clearer.

Crafting Target Marketing Email Text

Now that you’ve got an idea of who you’re aiming for, it’s time to begin putting a persuasive and engaging message together.

But before you pull out a pen and paper, it’s always a good idea to do some prewriting exercises. Begin as previously suggested, by defining the purpose of this message.

Are you informing a trusted customer of a new product? Trying to increase your visibility?  Let the answers guide your drafting efforts.
To put it succinctly: be informative, entertaining, agreeable, inspiring, and visually appealing.

Informative-If a visitor to your site has handed you their email address, you can assume that they’re interested in your industry. Take advantage of that fact, by keeping them up to date with news or updates that are relevant to the field.

Entertaining- This is another powerful tool used to create conversions. If you put the idea that your emails are fun or interesting into your client’s mind, they’re far more likely to open them up. Entertaining content is capable of building brand loyalty.

Agreeable- Always try to speak in a conversational tone to your customers. Be conscious of how your message sounds. You’re neither a politician nor a salesman; you’re a friend offering useful information about a subject of interest.

So write like you speak, unless you’re oratory isn’t up to par. If that’s the case, then write how someone else speaks. Someone charming. Think Neil Patrick Harris, but less overtly sexual. Just try to be amusing, approachable, and accommodating.

Inspiring-This approach should be used sparingly. You don’t want to come off as a motivational speaker. Just be aware that using amazing or inspiring stories to illustrate a point about your industry, product, or service can give an impression of being genuine. It’s all part of building trust.

Plus, being inspired is fun, why wouldn’t you want to share that with your customers?

There’s obviously a lot more to creating conversions with email than just text. You’ve got to keep a schedule, incorporate effective imagery, and examine the campaigns of successful competitors as well. However, these are complex subjects that cover a lot of ground. In the interest of brevity, we’ll cover the rest of this material in our next two posts.

In the meantime, take a look at how Ashop uses Google analytics to gain those coveted consumer insights, and learn how these can help you craft effective emails by signing up for a free 10 day trial of premium Ashop service.