A new client approach me and my team about doing some branding and marketing for their newly formed company. The client brought a good case study on why do-it-yourself marketing doesn’t work so well and how putting money in one area won’t necessarily fix the problem.

One item they wanted us to help them with was a landing page which an e-blast campaign would drive subscribers to. First of all, they were unclear about what a landing page was and how an effective landing page should work. The bigger problem was not that they didn’t have a landing page yet, but was that they were sending out an e-blast campaign that had only one response; to remove that user from the list.

This client’s e-blast campaign consisted of a very long email, with no graphics, no branding and which looked like a tedious task just to read and sent it to a list of potential customers whom they borrowed from past employers. Everything about this previous sentence is wrong. Let’s start one by one.

1. Lists should be qualified, interested potential customers, not unsuspecting recipients. The best kind of subscriber is one who opts in themselves. It’s understandable that when you’re a start up company in your first few months of operation that you don’t have a list yet and that people don’t know who you are yet. The last thing you want to do is send SPAM in any one’s direction, especially a potential customer. If you don’t have a list yet, try going to an industry trade-show where potential customers go to look for your services. An easy way to get a mailing list is to have a giveaway that requires them to put their business card or contact information into a drawing to win a fun prize. By entering in that drawing, they understand that you’ll be adding them to your mailing list. Secondly, add a signup form on your website for users to request to be added themselves which lets you know that they are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
2. Long email type of e-blasts won’t win any readers. You have to think about this in two different ways. For one, step inside the shoes of the recipient. If you received an email trying to sell you something and at first glance, thought, “Boy, this will take a while to read”, then you, just as they, would either pass it up for later (never) or trash it. Secondly, think about this from a sales perspective. You’re better off to say less, but be concise than say everything and be broad. Shorten your copy and stick to the key points of the message that you’re trying to convey and end it with a call to action, whether it be to order your product, or to go to your website for them to get more information, order or sign up for your product or service, or to just correspond with you. Remember, less is more.
3. No visual aides and no branding aren’t very helpful. If you had signed up for an newsletter for a company, you’d most easily identify with that company by their logo and branding that you would have already seen at some point. When you receive a generic looking email, you’re more likely to pass it by or move it directly into the trash. Adding your logo and a few touches of brand design to your e-blast campaign will help strengthen your brand and help recipients easily identify it as yours. A clean, elegant design with the right amount of copy can go along way and can even be inviting to read. Depending on the audience, it can even be very enhancing to the product or service.
4. Never send from Outlook or any desktop email client. Something that wasn’t mentioned, was that they sent this out from their desktop email program such as Microsoft Outlook and didn’t use a professional e-blast sending service to deliver the content. For one, they had to hand enter the email addresses, had a 500 recipient limit with their particular desktop application, and had to Blind Carbon Copy those recipients. Needless to say, if they used a service, they could have set up a campaign list and imported those addresses and began to manage them appropriately. Additionally, any images that they would have included come across as attachments and are even more likely to annoy the recipient and get caught in the spam filter than you’d realize.

What about messaging?

The correct way to think about messaging for an e-blast is short and concise, but based on the use of the e-blast and the target audience and the expected content. Someone who signs up for a Target newsletter is expecting something different from someone who signs up for the XBOX newsletter. Two different audiences, two different e-blast objectives.

Start by defining the objective of the e-blast, its purpose and the content to go in it. Once you determine the audience and objective, write your e-blast tailored to those. Keep it short and informative and have a strong call to action in there to get readers to respond to it. Write in terminology that the recipient will understand. Don’t use lot or buzzwords to try to dazzle your user, no matter how intelligent they are or have privy they already are to those words. Keep the language on an easy to understand level. Recipients will see through your e-blast if all you do is use buzzwords. Using too many buzzwords also brings about questions of credibility. Just because you can use buzzwords doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand them.

If your call to action in the e-blast campaign is to drive traffic to your website to sign up for something, think again. Instead you should drive them to a landing page or mini site (whichever is appropriate) to get them to view the information you want them to view and/or sign up. If you’re trying to get your users to sign up for auto insurance, your e-blast should have been informative about your services offered and why they should choose you. When they click through to get to your landing page, you can provide more details about your offerings, but most importantly, give them the form that you’re requesting them to fill out to get an official quote. The fewer links that take the user away from that page and the less distractions, the better. Focusing your user on the intended content will prove to drive your conversion rate. The last thing you want to do is drive your user to a page with an overwhelming amount of information or link that take them elsewhere and way from the goal you have of getting them to sign up or purchase your product.

The last thing to remember about having a successful e-blast campaign is to tread lightly on the usage of the email list. Unless the user asked for it, they don’t want to receive an email from you every day trying to sell them something. Many companies send out something just once a month and/or on special occasions only. If you send too many, the potential clients will start to avoid your email because they’ll see them as tedious tasks that they are being asked to fit into their already busy schedule, or worse yet, they’ll immediately request to be removed from the mailing list. If at any point they do request to be removed from the mailing list, you should do it. Continuing to send mailings to someone who has asked not to is a great way to anger them. When you’re brand is on the line, the last thing you want to do is give yourself a bad reputation and change and positive pre-conceived notions about your brand to something sour.