I tell you one thing that absolutely drives me nuts is when I receive (bulk) email from companies (and people) I know and the email has absolutely no relevance to me. They’ve picked out what they want to say and, with absolutely no thought as to what I’ll think about it, have blindly sent that message to everyone on their database. They don’t even think about the relevancy of the content and the recipients.
It’s a rookie error, but one that an awful lot of companies do. It drives me nuts.
How many companies do you know (particularly in the SME marketplace) who actually understand their database and segment it properly? How many companies take the time to look at their database and determine the true up-sell and cross-sell opportunities? How many companies adjust their communication to their database? Not as many as I’d like.
Bigger brands do this really well. Take Amazon as a case study for a second. Amazon has spent a lot of time and money in developing a pretty sophisticated bit of recommendation software. And it works.
What do they do? They look at your spending habits – what have you bought before? What are you spending money on? What products match up? What products are other people like you buying?
They have perfected the art of putting products you’re likely to buy right in front of your nose. It makes for an easy sell. You’re buying something anyway, and haven’t you wanted to get that book for a while?
Why do smaller companies not do this? It makes no sense to me. The tools are there to use. All you need is a basic CRM system and an email marketing tool of some kind. It’s not expensive. It’s not difficult.
I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago we worked with a financial advisory company in Canada. We had to talk to a lot of independent financial advisors about their business portfolio. It was shocking. They all had an extensive database of clients. They had absolutely no system for communication that would lead to more sales.
I started at the simplest point and asked an obvious questions – do people’s concerns (financially) change through their life? I got a simple answer: Of course it does.
It seems that young families are worried about mortgages and saving for their young children, middle age people were worried about university tuition and retirement and older people were worried about retiring and inheritance tax.
So why, I asked, are you sending the young families information on inheritance tax? Why aren’t you sending them the things they care about?
No answer.
The key to all of that is relevance.
When something is relevant, you’ll look at it. If something isn’t relevant. It’s spam.
When I work with a company on marketing campaigns, I start by matching their message with their targets.
What does that mean?
It means figuring out what parts of their business are relevant to their specific targets. What are they going to find relevant? What are the buttons you need push? What is going to make the company stand out?
There is simply no point in spamming your targets with everything you do. Choose carefully and make your offering relevant. It’s the easiest way of getting a response.
Or at least take me off your email database.
-jordan
If you would like to learn more about how to maximse your email marketing performance, please contact Jordan directly.
