| Content | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Lesson 3 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Welcome to session 3. The next session in our email marketing series takes a closer look at creating enticing content. Read on to discover how to captivate the attention of your subscribers through compelling messaging. Topics covered include: |
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| Content | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Overloaded inboxes and disingenuous marketing techniques have made it harder than ever to create an engaging and useful dialogue with your audience. Luckily, there is an answer — content first marketing. Working content first enables you to strategically distribute valuable, relevant and consistent content, designed to attract and retain a defined audience — ultimately driving profitable customer
action. Instead of pushing your products or services, content marketing provides truly relevant information to your client base, knowing their pain-points, and clearly addressing these with thoughtful assets. Before you start putting pen to paper, consider who your content is for, what problems it solves for them, and if it is of genuine interest. Without being able to answer these key questions, content marketing will not be successful. When used in tandem, email marketing and content marketing can fuel each other, expanding your shares, and increasing your reach with little additional action from the marketer. |
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| How to define and find your audience | ||||||||||||||||||||
| First things first — know your audience. Know their challenges, their pressures, and what information they value. But knowing your audience won’t lead to an increase in engagement alone, break up your customer types into key segments. A good place to start is location, age, gender, buying behaviour or interests. You can also try using more advanced techniques with more data, such as the type of content you know they engage with, or build this by creating a customer preference center. Segment your lists to send relevant blogs, products, or news most likely to resonate with them. Starting from scratch? Unsure on what your subscribes actually want in their inbox? Just ask. Send a welcome email asking what type of content they’d like to receive. If you are confident that you are sending relevant and intriguing content already, encourage your subscribers to share this on their social media feeds. Having a button that easily shares your content lets your audience do the hard work for you, and gets your company in front of far more people than your email list. |
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| A detailed example of good email content in action | ||||||||||||||||||||
| All emails need to have a purpose, and this was something that was lacking in the communications being sent by the popular shoe seller; Elves and the Shoemaker. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Whilst they had good strategic direction of their business overall, their email marketing had suffered from neglect, with little to no thought being put into the content of their sends. We recommended a series of changes to their email marketing strategy, enabling them as a brand to stand out in their audiences inboxes, to have clear purpose, and ultimately to improve sales and engagement. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Direction | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Instead of firing out emails as-and-when they could, we encouraged our client to think strategically about what content they had to offer. We worked together to create a content calendar, highlighting and marking all of the send opportunities throughout the year. This included big promotional sales periods, and smaller outreach campaigns focused on single measurable outcomes. By narrowing focus, we were able to create great email content that was delivering a simple message, every time. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Subject line | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Subject lines are gatekeepers. When you get it right and you see a satisfying open rate, get it wrong and your audience will not open your email. For Elves and the Shoemaker, we A/B tested different subject lines across their sends to optimise what works best for their audience. We considered how each subject line should reflect the different content marketing efforts. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Preheaders | ||||||||||||||||||||
| These are often overlooked yet it can be a valuable tool to encourage your customer to open your email. For our clients, we used it as an extension to their subject line to offer more insight into the content of the email to prompt their audience to open. By keeping it short (between 40–70 characters) and to the point, the preheader works as a succinct call to action. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Body copy | ||||||||||||||||||||
| On average we receive 120 emails a day, which means unless it stands out in a crowded inbox, it's unlikely to get read. We assessed Elves and the Shoemaker’s tone of voice documents, ensuring all email communications reflected their ideal brand narrative, and stayed consistent across all campaigns. As they wanted their brand and emails to feel fun and reflective of their youthful market, we created content that spoke directly to the audience in the first person, and that kept a cheeky sense of humour. We paid careful attention to appeal to their audience, not to pander. After careful market research, we knew exactly how to talk to their audience about what matters most to them. To help our clients’ emails make an impact, we focused on adding a customer name to the copy. This allows their customers to immediately feel connected to the send. We also based it on location, using the details of their local store. We also incorporated previous shopping habits, adding product suggestions based on previously bought items. |
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| Signing off after sending | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Merging your efforts between content and emails is a great starting point, enabling you to create niche content before moving out to other platforms. But don’t push all your energy into just your email marketing, your audience will have an integrated browsing strategy, and your marketing approach should reflect this. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Quick wins | ||||||||||||||||||||
| How to improve your content in email marketing | ||||||||||||||||||||
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