Email Marketing Strategy: your content should add value

One of the biggest challenges is to choose the right content for an email campaign. It should be useful content that also promotes your business or communicates your current campaign or promotion. If you send a pure sales pitch and the customer is not ready to buy, then your email piece will go to the trash because it does not bring any value to the reader. But if you always add some value, then the probability of that piece being saved, is greater.

So where do you get valuable content from?, well here are some ideas provided by our friends from Constant Contact, a leading email marketing business tool:

• Share Some Secret.-  As a business owner you have certain secrets to success that might me interesting to others and that will not damage your competitive advantage if read by a competitor. Be sure to share a secret that most of your audience can use. Let me give you an example: one of the secrets of our email campaigns is that when somebody responds we respond back very fast so we keep the momentum and establish communication with the prospect when he still has the topic on his mind. .. there you go!… I have just shared a secret.
• Share Knowledge.- there are many opportunities for you to provide knowledge-boosting content to your subscriber base.  For example, accountants can share relevant information on finances o taxes, doctors on a new drug or relevant discovery, Spas on new treatments or products to soften the skin, home furnishing stores on do-it-yourself ideas, etc… you get the idea, usually a piece of knowledge that can bring the reader closer to your business.
• Reply on Your Customer´s Expertise.- invite a customer to share his experience, write a testimonial, publish an interview with a customers, etc.
• Turn Questions into Content.- ask your customer service department which are the most common questions they receive and write an email marketing piece on the answers to those questions. Chances are good that more than one person has the same question, so your answer can benefit many.
• Content from Third-Party Sources.- not everything you write need to be original content, you can use information from your suppliers or form other experts, just make sure you credit where the content came from and link back to the original source.
• Hire Content Development.- if you are running a full Internet Marketing campaign supported on a digital media plan that defines a content blue print an a content publishig schedule for email, blogs, social media and your web properties, then you could very well hire a professional content development service. Keep in mind that traditional advertising agencies do not develop good content for web, they do not know about content browsing, they do not know about search engine optimization a many other related topics, so do not hesitate to hire a digital marketing agency that can write conten for you.

So inspire yourself! And be sure to add value, through content, to your email marketing campaign, even though your main goal might be to capture a new client.

Our topic tomorrow will be: Email marketing strategy: testing. .. Really interesting, see you here!.. To be on top of frequent email marketing info, follo @3emailmarketing in Twitter.