Email marketing isn’t just about withdrawing cash from your list every time you push an email into an inbox. It’s about building a relationship with your users so that they see you as the only source of the products they need. That means doing more than sending them emails about your products. It means showing that you care about your customers and their needs as much you care about your own business. There are a number of different types of content you can create that shows you care — and the best news is that each of them brings a real benefit to you too.
1. Create a Special Offer
Special offers might be the workhouse of email marketing and the most powerful way to bring in immediate sales but when they’re exclusive and pitched as a reward for being a subscriber, they also help to build a closer relationship with leads. They prompt subscribers to believe that they’re receiving gifts that others aren’t getting and that it’s worth continuing to receive those emails.
And they generate immediate sales too!
2. Community News
News emails don’t push products. The call to action might lead to a conference site or a partner’s blog instead of a sales page. They don’t generate sales… at least, not directly. But an email informing subscribers that you’ll be attending a conference and hope to see them there, or informing them that a platform has upgraded its software and that they should download the new version brings you closer to your subscribers. It’s the equivalent of a chat around the watercooler in which you’re giving valuable, interesting information to a friend for free.
You wouldn’t want to send too many of these messages — there’s always the chance that your subscribers will know the news as well as you — but an occasional news post keeps your messages read.
3. Sneak Peeks
Subscribers joined your list because they wanted to know more about your company and its products. That curiosity is an asset that you want to keep alive and active. One way to do that is to take them behind the scenes of your firm. Give them sneak peeks of products you’re working on. Keep them up to date on progress on new lines. Introduce them to the designers and engineers who are creating the products they’re thinking of buying.
Those peeks behind the scenes do more than reward curiosity. They build anticipation. They turn each product into the last line of a story that your emails build up over time.
4. Give Away Freebies
Free gifts are the ultimate reward but they don’t have to be hugely expensive and sometimes they’re necessary. When a competitor issues a new product with features or services that your product lacks, for example, you need to upgrade and your customers need to get that upgrade for free if you’re going to keep them.
You don’t have to put it quite that way in the email though. Tell them that there’s a download available, inform that they can take it for nothing and they’ll treat it as a gift from a supplier who cares rather than a store concerned primarily about the strength of the competition.
5. Check Their Preferences
When you’re sending out multiple emails to multiple list segments, it’s important to make sure that readers are only seeing the messages they want. Sending an occasional email — perhaps once every six months — asking them to confirm their list choices suggests that you’re concerned about bothering your subscribers, while also keeping your lists segments targeted and up to date.
Whichever type of content you use to show your subscribers you care, the result should always be that your leads show they care about you the only way they can — by buying your products.