madcomments

Why open email campaigns?

Posted in Direct Marketing, Digital, Mel Varley, Latest reporters' blogs November 28th, 2007 by Melinda Varley

Every morning I find myself opening around 20 different email marketing campaigns and admittedly, I’ve started classifying them as junk without a second thought. So what would entice me, and other consumers, to actually open these emails?

“Relevance is key,” was the general theme of mad.co.uk’s Email Marketing for the Real World conference, has this not been a simple matter of common sense before?

The key to successful email marketing campaigns is not in sending vouchers for 10 per cent off or a chance to win a free holiday, but to tell customers what they want to hear. If they’ve signed up to receive your email campaigns, half the work is done.

Take for example ASOS.com. ASOS had a lucrative tie-up with Britain’s Next Top Model which attracted me to its website. I then spent a few hundred quid on some new threads and ‘opted in’ to receive its email marketing campaigns.

Once a week I get an email advertising a sale, a new style, new lines, new trends etc. I always click through to the website, 40 per cent of the time I make a purchase. Success! An why? Because it’s giving me exactly what I asked for.

Ryanair is to also be commended on its email campaigns. It always emails the latest offers and although I don’t always purchase a flight, I do spend half an hour clicking through the site to find the cheapest flight I can, no matter where the destination.

Again, these are things I am interested in. I am not interested in saving money on my credit card, joining a book club or wanting to test drive a new car. The key to direct marketing, now more than ever, isn’t to bombard anyone and everyone but instead make campaigns targeted to people who actually use the service or products being promoted.

The ‘opt in’ culture has definitely increased and it’s not to be ignored, in fact it is where the opportunities for success lie and if you have satisfied customers they are bound to tell their friends – a form of marketing that has been instrumental in Facebook’s success.