Consider the fact that for every 100 emails it is “normal” for 60 to 70 recipients to ignore you. We live in an attention economy where attention is becoming more and more scarce. Even good messages have difficulty in being read.
With that in mind what would improve your chances of your email being read? Here are a few musts:
- Match your content and offers to the needs, wants and desires of your subscribers. Most people are focused on themselves and what they want to sell. What if you stopped selling and started positioning? You can begin by discovering what’s important to your customer about being successful. Try asking your customer, and you’ll be surprised by their answers. Then follow up by asking how they think you could help them achieve that. This is the holy grail of high trust selling.
- Learn the value of real estate. Your email preview pane is really no different than prime commercial real estate or ocean front property. The above-the-fold mark in your email is somewhere around 400 to 500 pixels. This is the prime real estate on your computer and less than 50 percent of your email recipients will scroll below-the-fold. Make sure the use of that prime real estate is the highest and best use.
- Know what to ask, and how and when to do so. LEAD your customer down a “breadcrumb trail.” You don’t want to waste time sending irrelevant information that has no action and will only be ignored. Know what you want them to know, and never send just random data. Make your content relevant.
- Make your message sticky. Design your ideas that make them stick in the memory of your recipient. This is not easy if you are not creative. The action here is to strip an idea down to its core to where it is simple but profound. I highly recommend reading Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
- Include prominent calls to action. Have effective landing pages that help the users complete the action successfully and with little effort. Make sure you show gratitude when they give you what you asked for.
- Make it easy to do business with. Your customer does not want to call you. Make it easy on them and streamline how they can get attention online. Think about it – where is your customer? Likely in front of a computer. Do they really want your voice mail?
Written by Jeff Payne, Chief Marketing Officer jeff@ascendworks.com
