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6 Things Your Subscribers Expect You To Do Differently

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013

When we talk about “the evolution of email” part of what we’re referring to is the technology and how we as marketers use it. Industry-side evolutions in the past year or two include the linking of email and social, marketing automation, triggered messages and data integration. But I believe most of email’s evolution is centered around subscriber behavior. Much of the direction email marketing takes is guided by what our subscribers want (or don’t). Keeping up with the most recent technology is not as important as meeting our subscribers’ expectations.

As your subscribers’ expectations have evolved over the past couple of years, has your email marketing kept stride? Here are some of the things they would like you to do differently, if you aren’t already:

1. Provide more subscription options.
One size does not fit all in email subscriptions. Increasingly your subscribers want to receive narrower channels of content from you. Replace your “all subscribers” list with separate lists dedicated to the different types of content you distribute: conference marketing, newsletters, industry or company news, etc. If you already do that, look for ways to make your lists narrower still. For example, segment your conference marketing by area of functional responsibility or seniority, or launch newsletters for each strategically important segment of your subscriber base.

2. Provide no subscription options.
Instead of using a preference center to let subscribers select the content channels they’d like to receive, many brands are relying on internal data instead to pair subscribers with the most relevant content for them. The prerequisite for this approach of course is to have enough data about subscribers that you can steer the best content to them without them requesting it, giving brands that integrate a CRM or AMS system with email a distinct advantage. The upside to the approach is that it allows the marketer to send and even develop content based on observing subscribers instead of asking them. Henry Ford famously said that if he asked his first customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse. The marketer knows better than subscribers what content does or possibly could exist. Moving to a data-driven subscription model allows for innovation and flexibility, and removes the burden of choice from your subscribers.

3. Target content more precisely.
Both #1 and #2 above contribute towards the same objective of targeting content more precisely. Even if you pursue neither of those however, it is an objective worth pursuing in other ways. Your subscribers are receiving more emails from more brands than ever, while at the same time trying to manage communications in increasingly pervasive social and mobile channels. For your content to stick it needs to be more relevant, almost as though it was created expressly for each individual subscriber. Try going narrower with your content and aiming to be very relevant to a smaller percentage of your subscribers, instead of being sort of interesting to everyone. You may find you are able to break through with people who had been ignoring you, and may also discover that the subscribers you engaged with broader content are as connected as ever.

4. Make messages mobile-ready.
Mobile opens have already surpassed desktop clients like Outlook and web-based services like Gmail, and are poised to reach 50% of total email opens by the end of the year. While it is true that many subscribers who see a message on mobile will also find it later on their PC, it is also true that subscribers will act on a mobile message if it is optimized for that platform. Not only should it render well, but if you know a quarter or even half your audience is going to open the message first on a smartphone, that knowledge should influence your subject line and copy length (both of which need to be especially tight), your landing pages, and even your call-to-action. For now, consumers will ignore messages that are not mobile-ready; soon they will start ignoring the brands that send them.

5. Include a functioning reply-to email.
If you want your subscribers to interact with your emails, what is more natural than simply allowing them to reply in the same way they do to the messages from real people that continue to command their attention? Subscribers may not want to have a conversation with you or to be your friend, but they may have questions based on the message you have sent. Facilitating and even inviting a reply – instead of sending them to an online form or some other channel – will go a long way towards letting them know you are as attentive to them as you would like them to be to you.

6. Make unsubscribing easy.
Sting said, “If you love somebody, set them free.” What I think he meant is that if you love keeping your delivery rates high, set the people who don’t love you free. An unsubscribe link that is hidden or buried, or that opens a page with an extra step or a final plea to stay connected, complicates the unsubscribe process. Often, when faced with these extra steps the easiest thing for a subscriber to do is simply mark your message as spam. So that’s what they do, even if they know they opted in and the message is technically not an unsolicited message. Spam complaints are the most heavily weighted factor on deliverability. Making it easy for a subscriber to leave will help you reach more of those who want to stay.

Posted in Content Strategy, Engagement, Segmenting and Targeting | Comments Off

How to Win the Battle for Inbox Attention

Monday, December 17th, 2012

With email volume on the rise, social and mobile siphoning off subscribers’ time, and an increase in popularity of inbox management applications that make it easier for people to deal with email by kicking much of it to the curb before it even arrives, it is pretty clear that the battle for inbox attention is on.

Here are a few changes you can make to your email program today that will pay dividends in subscriber attention all year long:

1. Make a great first impression. The first email a new subscriber should receive is a triggered message confirming the new subscription or transaction. The performance of triggered messages is vastly superior to business-as-usual emails because it is the one time when you know your audience is attentive and even anticipating a message from you. We put a lot of energy into newsletters and promotions but because the open rates and click-throughs of triggered messages are multiples higher, using them effectively can yield a higher ROI. You have one opportunity to make a great first impression with a new subscriber. Use your confirmation email to set the tone for the rest of your email program: be engaging, include links to your social sites and leave them wanting more. Simply telling them in machine-speak that their subscription is confirmed not only squanders nearly perfect audience attention; it also loses you the chance to build on the momentum they’ve started by subscribing in the first place, which pays off in every subsequent message.

2. Trash the “All Subscribers” list. There is no message you can send to everyone on your list that will be relevant to them all. In fact, the more people you try to include, the less relevant the message becomes for each subscriber on it. So dump your “All Subscribers” list and put everyone instead into at least one segmented list. You know a lot about your subscribers already and now is the time to turn that knowledge into programmatic action. Even if someone has just joined your list, put them into a “New Subscribers” segment for the first 3 months and focus on introductory offers and educational content that teaches them about your brand and content.

3. Reserve the best content for email. There is a remarkable case study about how an electronics retailer named ZAGG identifies the best content before putting it in email. The company starts with a blog and posts 25-35 times every week. Each post is then posted out to its Twitter audience of 30K followers a couple of times. The posts that generate the most retweets and replies qualify for a run on the company’s Facebook page in front of 200K fans. Then, only the best-performing content that generates the most likes, comments and shares has proven itself worthy of inclusion in the company’s emails. ZAGG clearly places an enormous value on its email program and is also taking the steps necessary to preserve and even grow that value. It knows the content its subscribers receive is the best the company has to offer, which ensures that subscriber attention to the email channel remains high. Email drives sales better than social channels, so it is critical to maintain an open connection with your audience in the inbox for when you really need to move the needle on revenues, conference registrations, memberships, or whatever else moves your business forward.

Posted in Content Strategy, Engagement, Segmenting and Targeting | Comments Off

Creating Better Emails Faster With Repurposed Content

Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

I give a lot of advice on how to write better emails, but the word I really should use is create. The endgame of your email is to create a message that provokes a desired action – a website visit, conference registration, membership renewal, subscription or some other outcome that moves your business forward. Part of the reason that email works well is that the channel itself has your audience’s engagement. Your subscribers are in their inboxes all day long anyway, so placing the right message in front of them drives results.

But nothing says that the contents of that message have to exist solely within the inbox. Sometimes crafting some copy expressly for email does work and is what your audience expects. Other times, however, repurposing content from other channels not only saves time, but works just as well or better.

Here are a few places to source content for your next email:

1. The landing page: Ever write the copy for an email designed to send people to a pre-existing landing page, and find it’s hard to create something that describes what you’re offering as well as the landing page, but is not actually the same copy as the landing page? You can stop doing that. It’s OK to use the same copy that is already on the landing page (particularly if you know that the landing page converts). Yes, you run the risk of people reading the same thing in the email and then on the landing page if they click through, but if they did click they are interested in what you’ve written. You can also limit your repurposing to the segments of the copy that have the greatest impact. Think of a 15-second trailer to this week’s Big Bang Theory. It previews all the good bits so you’re actively looking for them when you watch the show, and not annoyed that you saw that part already.

2. Conference agenda: I have long believed that the most persuasive content around any well-programmed conference is not what is on the conference homepage that positions and describes the show overall, but the actual nitty gritty of what is going to be discussed on stage. In my own conference marketing emails I have relied heavily on agenda content and found that drives the highest engagement and does a superb job pre-qualifying prospects so that their email clicks are more likely to convert to registrations. This begs the question of whether you are putting enough energy into your agenda writing. If you are, try co-opting some of it in emails. If you are not, put energy there and you can take advantage of it on your conference site and in the inbox as well.

3. Your blog: A lot of companies put more resources into creating content for their blog than their social and email channels combined. So why not share it with your subscribers proactively, instead of waiting them to come and find it? Incorporate blog titles and abstracts into your other emails (like newsletters or conference promotions) and you may be surprised at how many clicks they pull. Or try out our RSStoEmail 1 pager and turn your blog into an email engine, sending messages out automatically based on whatever schedule you choose.

4. Social channels: Last week’s White Card was about some sources of email content that are not copy at all. Try working in images, photos, videos, slide shows, charts and other graphics that perform well on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube or Twitter.

Remember that when driving your registrations and memberships, no bonus points are awarded for email channel purity. Focus first on the action you want your subscribers to take, then find, repurpose or create the content that will best get the job done.

Posted in Content Strategy, Copywriting, Tips | Comments Off

How Promotional Emails Can Still Keep Out-of-Market Prospects Engaged

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

There is a version of the 80/20 rule in email, where the majority of your clicks come from a minority of subscribers. Your email ROI doesn’t suffer as long as the 20% (or so) drive the registrations / subscriptions / revenue / etc. that you need. But there is a hidden cost to emails that cater only to a minority of subscribers, regardless of near-term ROI. If your emails do not appeal in some way to most of your list, engagement will wane and unsubscribes will increase.

The reason that many people do not respond to your emails may have nothing to do with a lack of engagement with your brand; rather, they may just not be in-market for whatever it is the email is selling. Spend a few months sending messages that do not speak to them at all and they may no longer be around when they are ready to purchase. Remember, your email program has to meet your organization’s needs today as well as next year.

Even if you don’t have Big Data to tell you who from your list is in-market and automatically serve them a customized targeted message, there are still ways to use email to keep customers engaged throughout the purchase cycle. Here are a few ways to make your promotional emails engaging for subscribers outside the buying cycle, without limiting their appeal to those who are in-market:

1. Fill the gaps between purchases with content marketing: Most companies are now producing some kind of content marketing, such as blogs, videos, white papers and photo galleries. Featuring links to some of this content within your promotional emails can help qualify customers close to making a purchase as well as give out-of-market subscribers something to click on within the email. For example, if you are promoting an upcoming conference, only the in-market prospects will pay a lot of attention to links to the agenda or registration pages. But prospective attendees and non-attendees alike may be interested in a photo gallery from the cocktail reception at last year’s event, or a video of a different presentation the scheduled keynote gave recently.

2. Solicit comments and testimonials: Some subscribers are not interested in buying what you are selling in an email because they bought it already. Maybe their subscription is current or they attended a conference last year and it is a colleague’s turn to go. You can keep them engaged by soliciting comments and testimonials. A surprising number of people are happy to share when asked (witness the popularity of Facebook brand pages and how many comments they generate). Try working into your emails requests for comments and point people to your Facebook, YouTube or Instagram pages, to a product review engine on your site, or a testimonial form you set up expressly for the purpose. You may generate more clicks to read the feedback than to contribute, but that is a victory in itself.

3. A/B test content organization: One of the decisions you’ll need to make is which content to feature in your messages – the principal call-to-action for your in-market customers (eg. “Register today” or “Buy now”) or some of the content that helps qualify in-market customers while also keeping the rest engaged until they are ready to purchase. Experiment with different layouts and try A/B testing to see which layout works the best. If your subscribers are engaged, you will see a lot of click activity even at the bottom of your messages. If they are not, bumping up the content most likely to aggregate clicks may work better. Do this frequently, as every new offer will have new sets of in-market and out-of-market subscribers.

Posted in Content Strategy, Tips | Comments Off

Email Tip of the Week: How (and Why) to Repurpose Content for Email

Monday, September 17th, 2012

Most of what we find in the inbox are pointers, excerpts and other highlights designed to pull us through the message and onto a website. In this way, email works more like the trailer to a TV show that is on later tonight, where the objective is less to reward the audience immediately than it is to drive some action that will reward the audience later.

But email need not work that way. You have the attention of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people right in the inbox. To balance out all the asks in your email program, work in some content directly into the message that is useful, engaging and complete even without a click. The more value you contain in your message, the more likely you are to build anticipation for the next one. Here’s how:

1. Begin with the idea that email is a distribution channel as well as direct response. It is easy to get wrapped up in email click and conversion rates, and focus all our energy on nosing them upward. But email is also an engaging content distribution channel – entertaining, educating and edifying subscribers even without driving them to points beyond the inbox. In order for your email program to remain vibrant, it is important to balance out the calls to action with content that is useful and interesting even without clicks.

2. Identify and integrate effective content from other channels. Maybe you’ve posted a picture on Facebook that pulled in a hundred comments and likes, or an article on your blog got picked up by some other sites and rang up an uncommonly high number of page views. Did someone give a presentation recently with a particularly pithy point that was immediately passed around on Twitter by conference attendees? Maybe someone in sales put together a compelling graphic for a client presentation. Your organization has content everywhere. Work the most engaging and brand-enhancing examples into your emails – not as pointers directing your audience to your blog or Facebook page, but as the content of the email itself.

3. Be mindful of email engagement metrics. An email message with an irresistible article but nothing to click may be a huge win in the inbox if it drives significant readership. But opens are not as useful to your engagement metrics (and their impact on deliverability) as actual clicks. So be sure to include something in each message that allows your audience to give some indication of their engagement – such as sharing the content on their social channels, clicking to read similar articles or see additional pictures. It would be a cruel irony if boosting your inbox engagement resulted in fewer people receiving your messages.

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Come back next Monday for another email tip of the week, or see all previous tips here.

Posted in Content Strategy, Tips | Comments Off

Email Tip of the Week: Personalization is Content, not Technology

Monday, September 10th, 2012

Last week, Facebook made email headlines again because of a “misconfiguration” that resulted in personalized spam to the friends of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised. A number of my friends’ accounts were among them, so I received a handful of emails that were surprisingly effective in their simplicity. The sender names were my friends’ names and the emails’ subject lines said “for Mike.” My name was also included in message greeting (“hi Mike”) before the spam link. Only the senders’ addresses were incorrect, though the inbox usually just shows the sender name, not email address. The first message actually caught me out and I clicked on the spammy link. The personalization worked because the message tricked me into believing it was from someone who actually knew me, and who was sending me something I would find useful.

That’s the personalization strategy of a lot of legitimate emails as well – use some simple database technology to trick recipients into thinking the message is coming from someone who knows them, and who is sending them something useful. But effective personalization is not a function of tricking somebody. Sure it may work the first time, but your audience wises up pretty quickly. Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, unsubscribe or mark as spam.

Instead of parlor tricks, effective personalization comes from genuinely knowing what different segments of your subscriber base are interested in. It is not inserting a name into the subject line or greeting. Rather, it is a content strategy designed to create relevant messages and offers based on behavioral data.

For better results to personalized messages, begin with what you’ve learned about your subscribers since they’ve become customers or members, not what they told you about themselves when they signed up.

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Come back next Monday for another email tip of the week, or see all previous tips here.

Posted in Content Strategy, Tips | Comments Off

Achieving Your Optimal Email Frequency

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

For my column in MediaPost this week, I drew inspiration from a webinar I co-presented last week on Email List Building. The marketer co-presenting revealed that for some of her company’s subscriptions they were sending as much as 3 emails per day. Volume like that flies in the face of conventional best practices, but throughout the webinar and the Q&A that followed, she discussed how the company had been able to ratchet up the volume over time. Some best practices are ripe for revisiting. Does the opportunity exist for you to increase your own email frequency?

Achieving Your Optimal Email Frequency
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 7-25-12

Last week I participated in a webinar with an email marketer who said in her presentation that her company sends as many as three emails per day to some of its subscription lists. Almost all of the questions during the audience QA that followed were variations of, “How do you do that? Can you teach me?”

Many participants were aghast that a brand was sending so much email, but as the marketer explained how they had gradually worked up to that impressive frequency, the initial audience apprehension at the volume gradually evolved into understanding. And then they went straight to envy.

That was half the lesson from this marketer – that increasing email frequency is possible. Despite the research showing inbox overload, the pundits’ claims of channel fickleness, and the anecdotes we all hear (and share) about kicking brands to our inbox curb, it is still possible to pump up email volume, deriving more of whatever value the email channel provides to your company.

Of course, what that specific value is depends on your company and how you use email. If you’re a publisher generating ad revenue from your newsletters or the websites they drive traffic to, increasing frequency translates directly into increased revenues. If you are a retailer, conference producer, travel site or any other e-commerce business, more emails can translate directly into more sales. And if you’re neither of the above but use newsletters and other emails to maintain engagement or move customers closer to highly considered purchases, increased frequency can lift results there as well. The first step in increasing frequency is to determine what results you want to lift, so you know which email(s) to multiply.

Here are a handful of other tactics to help you find your optimal email frequency:

1. Just try it. It may be you’re already below your optimal sending frequency, so before changing up your content strategy and adding new rules, test sending at a sustained higher frequency to a segment of your list. The impact of more emails (particularly the negative) may not be felt right away, so run your test to the same segment for at least five new messages. Track your key metrics – including unsubscribes – over the entire period and look for burgeoning trends.

2. Add empathic content. If your current content strategy is not expandable into higher frequency (e.g., if you are a conference producer already sending a Register Today email every week for three months leading up to your event), look to create a new newsletter for the same audience with content that leans more toward their business needs than your own. Your goal here is less to drive clicks, registrations and purchases than it is to increase relevance for your brand and protect its mindshare in the inbox. Emails that ask your subscribers to do or buy something often work better when they are not the only messages subscribers receive from you (which is also one of the reasons why social complements email so well).

3. Go narrower. Broad content is designed to hold a little appeal for as many subscribers as possible. It’s hard to unsubscribe from newsletters that may have something of interest each time they are sent. But it’s equally difficult to get excited about receiving them and to truly anticipate their contents. On the other hand, narrower content appeals to fewer people, but with a much stronger pull. If you have a broad newsletter, try increasing frequency with an additional installment containing a deeper dive on niche topics. For example, if you publish a newsletter on energy and utilities, add one focused exclusively on solar power. If your conference marketing messages typically include the entire agenda, create some instead on what will be discussed within a single session.

4. Go wider. Many brands create all the content they distribute via email, using messages to drive traffic back to their own websites exclusively. Increasing frequency is therefore bottlenecked by the availability of proprietary content; you can only send out as much as you create. Another option is to curate complementary content. Add an ancillary newsletter on the exact same topic as your current one, but with articles collected from around the Web. Many brands already do this with their Twitter accounts, so rolling all of this up into a weekly or even daily email digest is not altogether onerous.

5. Normalize your analytics. Remember that since you are giving your subscribers an extra bite at the apple, your results for each individual message will probably not equal what you were seeing with your existing frequency. For example, if you expected 1,000 clicks from a message you sent every Monday, and you switch to Monday and Thursday sends, you might see your clicks on Monday drop to 750 and then drop further still to 500 on Thursday. In aggregate though, your increased frequency has found 250 incremental clicks. Weigh that against unsubscribes and the added resources of creating and sending that extra message to determine if you have increased ROI.

Posted in Best Practices, Content Strategy, Published Articles | Comments Off

Emailioration Monday, 6-4-12: Use Narrower Content for Deeper Engagement

Monday, June 4th, 2012

Many emails are written to try and include something for everyone, with content aimed at multiple roles, functional responsibilities, levels of seniority or interests. I understand the logic: if subscription is open to everyone, we had better include something for every person who subscribed, so they don’t find zero value aimed at them and then unsubscribe.

But attention is at an all time premium, so a nod to each segment in your subscription list may no longer be enough to keep them engaged. Now is the time to begin experimenting with narrow content aimed expressly at the segments of your list who are the most strategically important. Aim to make your newsletter not just unoffensive, but must-read for the people who matter to you most.

If that just isn’t possible because you have many disparate constituencies you need to continue to serve, launch niche newsletters for each of them, focusing solely on what is most relevant to each group. Remember that your objective is not to get your newsletter read, but to keep your audience engaged.

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Each week on “Emailioration Monday” we spotlight a single tactic you can implement this week in order to improve your email marketing. Share tips of your own on Twitter at #Emailioration, and see the full collection of Emailioration tips here.

Posted in Content Strategy, Emailioration, Newsletters, Tips | Comments Off

Signal-to-Noise Ratio, And The Rise Of Channel-Specific Content

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

For my article in MediaPost this week I picked up on a theme I spoke about at last week’s SIPA conference – Signal-to-Noise ratio. We know that all our communications channels rely on strong content, so it’s no wonder that when we create one we like to push it out through all of them. This is one of those practices that fails the “what if everyone does this?” test (which is important because everyone does, and there are more everyones every day). I foresee the rise of channel specific content in the very near future. Read the article to learn why, and what you can do to prepare.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio, And The Rise Of Channel-Specific Content
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 5-30-12

“We have to let everyone know about this.”

That phrase is common in marketing departments of all sizes, across all verticals, around the world. What “this” is could be a limited-time promotion, the opening of a conference’s registration, the receipt of a prestigious award — you name it. Whatever your brand, there is frequently something pertaining to it that is important enough to share with as many people as possible.

Up until recently, the common rejoinder to that phrase was, “OK, let’s send an email.” Today it is not so simple. Not only do most of us not enjoy 100% open rates consistently; we also do not limit ourselves to an audience in a single channel. So “Let’s send an email” has evolved into “Let’s send an email, put it up on Facebook, tweet it, post it to LinkedIn, pin it and put it on our blog.”

That’s a lot of messages, in a lot of channels. And since we inevitably have audience duplication across channels, it is also a lot of redundance. You can call it “increased frequency” if you like, but before too long your subscribers and fans and followers are going to start referring to it simply as noise.

Play it forward, and the rise of channel-specific content is inevitable. People may like a brand enough to follow it in multiple channels, but repeating the same messages everywhere will prompt your audience to choose one channel over the others, robbing your brand of incremental points of engagement. Today, channel-specific content is a sound marketing practice as it shows respect for the way your audience uses the inbox, Facebook, Twitter and other channels. Soon, however, channel-specific content designed to increase the signal-to-noise ratio will be the cost of doing business for any brand that wants all its channels to be as vibrant, engaged and responsive as possible.

Here are some steps for shifting your communications from pan-channel broadcasting to channel-specific content:

Describe each channel – to your audience and to yourself. When you invite your audience to subscribe, fan or follow, let them know exactly what kind of (unique) content they can expect in each channel. For example, you may use your email list for a weekly newsletter, Twitter for customer service, and Facebook for promotions. Promoting them as such is a form of targeting, as your audience is signing up for the specific content you are providing in each. It also helps build anticipation. This is an easy exercise if you already have some channel-specific content in place. But if all your descriptions look the same, it is a cue that you may be generating too much redundancy in your messaging and need to work on a content strategy that engages your audience in different ways.

Use your email analytics brain (and tools) on social channels to find the best-performing content. You already know how to use email analytics to measure the effectiveness of messages in the inbox. Now, the same sorts of tools are available to measure click-rate, conversion and other engagement metrics for social messages. Using them allows you to see not just how much each channel contributes to your marketing objectives, but also to identify which messages take advantage of each channel’s unique attributes to really shine. This level of intelligence is going to be vital very soon, as marketers will begin limiting messages to the channels in which they work best, in order to make sure that every message contributes meaningfully to its channel’s engagement.

Develop key metrics on channel engagement, not just message effectiveness. Much of the duplication we see across channels now is the result of optimizing at the message level; we try to squeeze as many clicks as possible out of each message by pushing it anywhere we have an audience. Instead, I believe marketers are going to need to focus on optimizing each channel instead of each message. Develop and track a set of key metrics for each message that measures how much engagement you are driving in aggregate across the channel. For example, you might track “Likes per Post” on Facebook, or “Mentions/RTs per Follower per Month” on Twitter. As with email, it is important to balance the near-term needs of your marketing objectives with the long-term health of your marketing programs. Reducing the signal-to-noise ratio and keeping a close eye on how engaged your audiences are across channels will ensure that you can count on each channel to move your business forward this quarter — as well as three years from now.

Posted in Channel Attribution, Content Strategy, Email+Social, Engagement, Published Articles | Comments Off

Emailioration Monday, 5-7-12: Reserve Unique Content for Emails

Monday, May 7th, 2012

One of email’s primary functions is to call attention to drive people to some product or piece of content on your website – a webinar registration, blog article or new product information. Email works well in this capacity – to serve the interests of your other media. It merchandises your content well and can drive traffic effectively.

Don’t forget, however, that email is also a medium all its own. Reserving some pieces of unique content which only appear within your emails will help build anticipation and underscore the stand alone value of the email channel. For example, if you run a sweepstakes or promotion, announce the winner only within your email newsletter. Run client or member interviews in email exclusively, or publish a relevant weekly statistic or data point there. I know it is tempting to push all our content out through as many channels as we can, but the long-term view requires that we also focus on what value we can add to the channels we rely on, not just the value we can extract from them.

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Posted in Content Strategy, Emailioration, Tips | Comments Off