People are leery of promotional emails, so it’s important not to annoy potential customers with your campaign. Here are 10 tips to help you avoid that problem.
1. Don’t flood your customers’ inboxes.
When considering the ways your email marketing campaign can become annoying in a flash, the easiest one to understand is the possibility that you may inundate a subscriber with your messages. Billions of emails are sent each day, with many going unanswered and unopened. If you send too many messages in quick succession, or too many emails that don’t really do anything for the recipient, you will likely bore your target audience and may even lose them completely.
You can ensure your emails don’t get too frequent by setting up a release schedule. Most email marketing campaign solutions allow you to set how often a new email will be released. If you don’t set a reasonable number of email messages to go out in your campaign, its recipients will likely grow weary of your message and will ultimately ignore it wholesale.
2. Make your email marketing strategy appealing.
Whether through targeted prose that gets your point across in an economic manner, flashy graphics that draw the eye to the information you’re looking to share, or a combination of the two, your emails need to grab subscribers’ attention. Failing that, your email content could go from a piece of digital marketing to just another message in someone’s spam folder.
Understand who your audience is, and then tailor your marketing strategy to their preferences. For example, an “appealing” marketing strategy for teens may look different than a strategy targeting a group of businesspeople.
3. Provide value to each reader.
That concept of providing value is important in making sure your email campaign doesn’t annoy its recipients. If your message doesn’t offer something your readers don’t already have or promise to make things better for them in some way, then there’s little incentive for people to keep opening your messages. Things get even worse if your tone eventually comes off as forceful.
“I think that it’s important for every email to provide value to each recipient so that it’s less likely to be considered annoying,” said Michael Anderson, marketing specialist at GeoJango Maps. “Additionally, the verbiage can usually be framed in a certain way to avoid sounding too pushy.”
Rather than asking people to buy your product, Anderson said, you can explain its benefits before offering a discount code for anyone who wants to make a purchase. “Ideally, you want the user to think that they came to the decision to purchase something from the business as opposed to the other way around.”
4. Don’t use a no-reply email address.
Email is a powerful way to stay in contact with people, and it should be viewed as a two-way street. When sending out marketing emails to your customers, avoid sending them from a no-reply email address. While it may be tempting, a no-reply address can hurt your marketing efforts in two ways: reduced deliverability and poor user experience.
Some users have security settings that automatically send no-reply emails straight to their junk folder. This means that your carefully curated marketing email may not even reach your customers’ inbox if you are using a no-reply email address.
Additionally, a no-reply address can diminish the overall customer user experience with your brand. It can be frustrating if a customer wants to reply to one of your emails with feedback (or possibly to opt out of further messages), and they receive an auto-response saying their message could not be delivered.
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