A little while ago I started subscribing to content from a website called Marketing Experiments. They send out a regular newsletter and regularly have webcasts for subscribers.
It was during one of their web casts recently that they shared a very interesting and I think, important, point! The point is especially relevant to those of you who use email marketing to promote your business and stay in touch with customers. Before I share it with you, let me ask you a question. What do you think is the main purpose of sending out a marketing email? I’m sure there are plenty of answers that spring to your mind. Things like:
- Stay in touch with customers
- Promote your business
- Tell customers about special offers
- Sell new products
Well, I suppose any of those points could be valid at various times. But often these ideas that we have about why we’re sending a marketing email are too abstract too be very useful. We can simplify the reason. Here it is:
The purpose of an email is to get a click
What, I hear you thinking? Just a click, what good is that going to do me? Okay, it may increase the visits to my website, but shouldn’t it do more than that?
Let’s think about this for a minute. The premise is quite simple really… email as a medium is not nearly as advanced as web technology. You can spend a bunch of time trying to get your email newsletter looking just right and putting lots of content in there, hoping that a viewer will sit there and read it all. But in reality, we know that:
a.) potential readers of your email will probably glance at it for between 1 and 3 seconds. Just enough time to decide whether to delete it, file it away for later or read it
b.) given the number of different platforms, email clients, phones, it’s almost impossible to design an email newsletter that will look the same for everyone.
Given this, if you can simplify your marketing email to be engaging simple and engaging enough to drive customers to your website you have a higher chance of conversion because:
i.) it is much easier to control the look and feel of a web page and;
ii.) readers will generally spend longer on a webpage then they will on an email.
So next time you’re writing an email newsletter, bear in mind what you’re trying to achieve by doing so. Yes, there may be a little more work involved in creating both the email and the web page that you want to drive your visitors too, but if you do it right you will convert more of your readers to clients and are more likely to achieve the desired result.