The Crisis of Relevance in Email Marketing

In previous issues of this newsletter I've discussed the all-important triumverate of email marketing savvy: Anticipated, Personal, and Relevant. Any email campaign you send should be all three of these things to your target audience. While the first two are clearly important, it is the third, Relevance, that is the most difficult to deliver in a sustained campaign.

To recap, anticipated means that your recipient is expecting to receive the email, i.e. they remember signing up for it and they will not be surprised when your message arrives. Next, if you've done your due diligence, you've made some effort to make the email personal - at the very least you've included a salutation in the email that says something like, "Dear Bob," instead of, "Dear Client." Now all you have to do is have something relevant to say. And it better be good.

The Answer to the Big Question
Much of the email we receive from companies today fails the third test: Relevance. The reason is because many marketers are stuck in old methods of marketing. The content they provide sounds like marketing-ese. I don't care how great a product or offer is, it doesn't make me want to settle in to read marketing copy. When you're vying for your reader's precious attention, you've got to know the answer to the all-important question. It's the question that every reader of every marketing email is asking. The answer to the question reveals whether or not you've achieved relevance in your campaign. The question is: "What's in it for me?"

So we equate relevance with value. Every campaign must offer immediate and obvious value to the reader. If you can answer the question in the first couple of seconds after they open your email, there's a chance they'll give you a few more seconds of their attention. And attention is gold in email marketing. Your customers have it. You want it. And you're going to have to do some work to get it. But if you do, you are rewarded with their trust and loyalty. If you fail, your subscriber base will start to shrink - the kiss of death in email marketing.

So how do you offer immediate and obvious value?
To offer an example, with our own email marketing product that we produce for our Realtor® clients, we practice relevance in a number of ways. First, we know that we're targeting the residential market - our readers are homeowners (or would-be homeowners). So we produce articles that are of interest to homeowners. The articles vary from month to month, sometimes focusing on home renovation and fix-it projects, other times it's interior design, gardening, or topics relating to protecting your home investment. These are topics that as a homeowner I myself am interested in.

But occasaionally a reader might not be interested in any of the articles we offer that month. So we diversify, and we offer value and relevance in additional ways. We include a valuable monthly sweepstakes in every issue. The sweepstakes are likewise geared toward the homeowner. One month the sweepstakes might be a gift certificate to a furniture store. Another month it might be a Home Depot gift card. Although admitedly, we've recently jumped on the iPod bandwagon. Everybody is giving away iPods nowadays, but with good reason. Everybody seems to want an iPod. They have generated good results so far.

Even in this message we're practicing relevance in multiple ways. At some point each reader of this email signed up to receive it because they believed it might be of value to them. So we've done our level best to put together some useful information for you. In addition, we've put our iPod offer in the right column, as well as an announcement of another level of service we'll be adding in early 2006, our webcasts and seminars for Realtors®, which many readers will undoubtedly be interested to know about.

I hope you've found value in this article. I thank you for your attention. If you have questions or article ideas for this newsletter, please send them to me: . Expect another issue of our best practices entry in two weeks.