38 e-Branding 2: Emails

38

E-BRANDING 2: CUSTOMER EMAILS

As a general rule, unless their work is related to the communications industry, people born after 1983 don’t use email that often for their personal messages. They use social media and online messaging. But people born before then use email regularly.

The idea If your customers are aged around 30 to 55, then you stand a good chance of reaching them with an email, as long as you’re using software with the right tools to get your messages through personal and company fi rewalls. Get it right, and you’ll see an instant fl ow of visitors to your website as soon as your email reaches people’s inboxes. Get it wrong and they’ll either ignore you or unsubscribe.

It’s greener to send emails. You can save on postage and paper (and vans) by using an email address instead of a postal address. You can use your email software’s analytical tools to tell you how many people opened it, deleted it, or deleted it without opening it, and how many chose to unsubscribe.

Most of us get with a daily email fl ood of things that we have subscribed to, let alone all the other junk that appears in there from people who don’t follow the law, and those who our deliberately breaking it to see if they can raid our bank accounts and steal our identity. At busy times, we scroll through the inbox and only read

the ones that look important.

I recommend that you make your emails and social media: • interesting • useful • entertaining • valuable • amusing • and preferably a combination of at least two of those things. Your customers’ time is valuable; if you waste it, you’ll annoy them and they’ll start to associate your brand with feeling irritated. Give them something that adds to their day, which they might value enough to forward to a friend, and you’ll go up in their estimation. Measure your responses carefully. Notice if you send an email that gets forwarded, and do more like that. If you send one that gets you a swarm of unsubscribers, change your method.

In practice • Give your email a subject line that will get your readers’ attention, and make sure they know it’s from you. People are more likely to open one from the Jilly at the Tasty Chocolate Company, than the same email that says it’s from Jilly. • Follow the Data Protection Act rules. • Decide how regularly you want to send emails then stick to it: monthly, weekly or daily, or only six-monthly if that’s how often you have something interesting to say. • Measure your responses carefully. Notice if you send an email that gets forwarded, and do more like that. If you send one that gets you a swarm of unsubscribers, change your method.