The principles of follow up marketing have been around ever since there was organised commerce.
No matter what medium your follow up messages are communicated in, as long as you follow the personal, relevant and anticipated mantra as outlined by one of our follow up heroes, Seth Godin, they are likely to do well.
However, when it comes down to actually writing and sending your email follow up, our consultancy clients always seem to come up with the same few questions such as:
- What should my content be about?
- How many emails should I send in a week?
- How do I know my messages are getting through to the right person?
Our advice to them is always to try not to over-think your campaign and to follow these three tips:
1) Don’t ignore delivery reports. Make sure that you analyse things like non-deliverable emails, un-subscribes, opt outs as well as emails opened and links selected, as they can all help future campaigns to be more efficient and also cleanse your database. Also, split test emails and headlines as much as you can so you find the optimum format, copy and style that converts into open rates and conversions.
2) Find a way to segment your database. With any email campaign, it is important to try to segment your data in order to match your offers with customer preferences. Every email should be sent with segmentation in mind, people who opened, people who didn’t, people who responded to the CTA, people who didn’t. This will allow you to build up group profiles and send out relevant offers that are much more likely to get a response.
3) Don’t treat every email contact as sales copy. Try writing as if you were writing to a friend by recommending articles and websites, educating people by telling them a cool feature or benefit of your product, or what about asking an opinion on your business? Try it and test it, you might be surprised how many people respond when you remove the hard sell element of your email campaign.
These three tips help form the core of all of our follow up and email marketing campaigns that we consult on or design. We still regularly re-read them when analysing any campaign in order to make sure that we are still practising what we preach.