You devote considerable resources towards optimizing your company’s email newsletters, promotions and announcements, but your organization also sends out a lot of email that you might not even think about:
- confirmation emails for conference registrations
- survey notifications
- auto-response messages for submitted forms on your website
- reminder emails preceding webinars or subscription and dues deadlines
- even out-of-office replies from your employees’ accounts
Email is not just a message. It’s media. Every time an email travels from your organization to a subscriber, customer or member, you have an opportunity. If only for a moment, you own the inbox. Click on the tab or icon for your own inbox right now. See that preview pane, and all the real estate it contains? Each time one of the message types I just mentioned reaches your audience, that entire preview pane is yours. Optimize, leverage, exploit it. Here’s how:
Take inventory. Consider all the examples I list above. How many of them does your organization currently send? For each, look at what you are sending currently for those messages. Do the messages carry the same brand impact as your newsletters and promotions? Is the language the same as the well-crafted emails you send to compel a specific action? Are they designed and formatted comparably to your other messages? Even though these aren’t your high profile messages, they are still very high impact, and likely have extremely strong open rates. They should feel like a part of your whole email program, not messages sent out of obligation or custom.
Apply your voice. In many instances, these messages were written by someone other than the people who compose your marketing and promotional email. They weren’t written to have personality or a voice; rather to check an item off of someone’s to-do list. Start by rewriting them in the same voice employed in your other communications. Consider upgrading the subject lines as well, if they’re currently more process than panache. Subject lines are read more than messages, so they alone represent a sizable opportunity to work on behalf of your brand.
Pimp your presentation. More often than not, these emails are plain text. Normally, this isn’t a deliberate selection, but a default to what was the simplest to create. Unless there is a very good reason for them to remain plain unformatted text (such as, er… I can’t actually think of a good reason), dress them up. Add a banner image or even create a custom template for them. Include your logo, or at the very least a HTML signature file that links back to your website and your presence on social channels like Twitter and Facebook.
Use the inbox as Media. Typically, these messages are singular of purpose – to deliver information on a purchase confirmation or form receipt or other small piece of communication. But their scope can be broadened. Yes, they can still say “Thanks for completing our survey” but they accomplish the same work and more if they say “thanks for completing our survey. Don’t forget that our Annual Meeting is coming up on November 12-14 in Orlando.” They can do this with a little extra copy in the body, a PS, another copy block at the bottom, or through graphical ads and other design elements. The inbox is yours – be creative in how you leverage the opportunity for the rest of your organization’s objectives.
