In our last edition of eNudge News, I listed the following as the first of the 4 Keys for Business Growth in 2009:

I really can’t emphasize enough the importance of connecting with and providing value to your audience.

Your contacts really want to feel like you are speaking to them, about something that is actually relevant and useful to them. Otherwise they will stop reading your messages.

You will never achieve a feeling of connection through your emails or sms messages unless you:

1. Put yourself in the shoes of your contacts, and think about (or ask them directly) what they want to hear about before putting together your messages or your special offers.
2. Send your message to subsets of your list so that you can ensure that the message is relevant to the contacts that receive the message. This might require you to write more than one version of your newsletter for instance.
3. Write your message in a communication style that makes people feel like you are sitting down having a coffee with them – try and visualise that as you are writing your message.
4. Personalise your message, perhaps also the subject line. I mention this last, because personalisation is possibly the least important of these 4 points. Of course, the more you personalise a message the better. eNudge allows you to personalise your message in an unlimited manner because you can add your own special fields to any campaign. Have you considered adding a personalised paragraph for specific contacts that is very personal to them e.g. ‘it was great meeting with you last week…’?

A recent Borders email gave a great example of personalisation. If you have a look at the image to the right, you will see that Borders have included the contacts name in the front cover of a new book, as the co-author of a new book. Seeing my name on the front cover of a book certainly got my attention!

With regard to providing value, I would also like to share a recent experience I had while shopping in a specialist clothing store. I’m not much of a shopper, so having found this particular store which had some great products, but not enough of the items that I wanted, I was keen to be added to their mailing list to hear when new stock arrived. I was very disappointed to be told that they don’t do any emailing at present, and that I should just drop by the store every so often when I’m nearby to see if they have new stock. Hmmmm…. where’s the value in that? This experience reminded me that businesses that are doing email marketing in Australia are fairly unique.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 12:59 am and is filed under electronic marketing, Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.