Achieving the right balance between using email as a sales tool and as a value-added information and entertainment tool is the key to success. This is also an important part of a brand's email value proposition.
Email marketing that focuses on customer experience understands that both customers and marketers bring a set of goals to the email experience. Marketers must balance commercial goals with providing value to the users who receive their emails. Focusing your email messages on helping customers achieve their goals will help marketers achieve their goals, too. Informative, personalized, and customer-focused messages are more likely to achieve this balance than emails that focus solely on brand-driven content.
Cath Pei, author of Ecosultancy's Email Best Practices Guide, calls this process of delivering customer-centric emails rather than brand-driven content “helpful email marketing.” Rather than basing your relationships with customers solely on transactions, frame every email as a customer service-oriented message, even if the ultimate goal is a sale.
What is useful email marketing?
Effective email marketing puts the customer first in everything, starting with your email strategy. The organization leverages all its customer knowledge, along with its customer acquisition practices and messaging expertise, to deliver value in every message. Even when companies set goals for their email teams to achieve, they recognize that they need the cooperation of their customers to achieve those goals.
Creating value in your content is especially important in a B2B environment, where sales cycles are often long. It's important to maintain engagement over this period while also driving recipients towards your product and ensuring your brand remains top of mind.
This concept of useful email marketing, as explained in Ecosultancy's “Quick Guide to Why Email Still Matters” and “Email Marketing Best Practices: Copywriting Report,” gained attention during the pandemic. During this period, many brands found that consumers were more receptive to communication, especially messages that showed how to cope during a crisis. These emails prioritized customer concerns over commercial goals.
Helpful email marketing involves providing information that is useful or useful to your target audience, such as guides or demos. This approach also allows marketers to strive to position themselves as experts in their field by providing a place where their audience can seek important information, guidance, or best practices.
Marketers can also consider how different types of content can help foster a sense of community. This allows your audience to feel like they are members of that community, rather than just a number in a database.
The following example from EasyJet shows a combination of valuable content and product-specific messaging (Figure 1). This email contains all the information the passenger needs to have a successful flight.
Figure 1: Example of balancing valuable content and “selling”
Source: EasyJet
get the balance right
It can be difficult to balance being helpful and selling. Many company newsletters are overly promotional, while others are less salesy and manage to avoid showcasing the latest products.
What often gets lost in the discussion is the role email plays in the trading process. Email is a way to direct your customers to a landing page where a conversion occurs. This doesn't mean your email message should be a bare-bones poster with just a few lines of content and a call-to-action button. Rather, email's job is to pique the customer's interest enough to click a button and convert via a landing page designed to most effectively close the sale.
This model keeps marketers in control of their email environments while experimenting with technologies like AMP for Email. AMP for Email promises to improve the interactivity of emails (particularly within inbox providers Gmail and Yahoo) so that conversions occur within the message rather than at the landing. page.
Until the day comes when every email message in every inbox can both start and end a transaction, marketers need to focus on using email as a springboard to conversion. there is. (For more information about AMP for Email, see Econsultancy's report, Email Marketing Best Practices: Layout and Creative.)
As a primary customer communication tool, email should educate new customers about your brand's values while reinforcing your brand message to existing customers. This can be achieved through brand identity, lanyard lines or containers that demonstrate the brand promise, or links to key products in newsletter headlines. An approach used by many.
A high-level approach in a B2B newsletter can focus on real-world projects that use the services, products, or technology your company produces. Links within the newsletter may lead to articles that focus on the impact of the product rather than the product itself.
Many communications require a more streamlined approach. One example of this is transactional emails, such as abandoned cart emails. Keep this type of campaign as clear and focused as possible, minimizing other links that might be distracting.
Build trust with content that goes beyond your brand
Tony Allen, senior global CRM manager at Pearson, was interviewed last year on useful marketing topics for Econsultancy's email marketing best practices guide (while working as global CRM lead for D2C at Volvo ).
“If you can provide your customers with a variety of content, they will start listening, become interested in what you have to say, and listen intently. The challenge is to create content that is specific, relevant, and engaging. It's a big challenge.
“In our emails, we wanted to move away from just talking about the brand, such as using press releases and reviews about new models or promoting the purchase of new accessories. It's all valid and We fully support your content strategy. But we also wanted to show the human element, look at the automotive industry as an industry and show how content created elsewhere can be used. is.
“So we added third-party content, such as an American newspaper article that introduced taxis as electric vehicles and featured them charging on the road. We didn’t mention Volvo at all, but everything was about electric, more This is about EVs in a broader sense.
“If we're going to engage with our customers, we want to build that trust, even if it doesn't necessarily come from the voice of Volvo. I think it's very important to get ideas.”
