Email Marketing Strategy: Determine Your Audience (Week 1)
Several clients have approached me recently with questions about some of the basics of marketing via permission-based email newsletters, and rather than re-create the message from scratch each time, I’m posting the information here. For the next several weeks, I’m going to post parts in a series about Developing an Email Marketing Strategy. After that, I’ll be back to our usual drivel, I promise!
Determine Your Audience. More than likely, you’re already familiar with your target market — those prospects who make you smile most, when they convert to actual clients. But for many businesses who are marketing via email, your target market may not be the exact market that will open and read your email messages. Busy professionals, for instance, may receive more than a hundred emails in a day, and — nothing personal, but your message doesn’t possess the same urgency that others in an inbox might.
While this doesn’t mean that you should not communicate to that market, you should rather a little time thinking about what will make that target client stop and read. What will come across as relevant? What will come across as urgent? It’s often the urgent, and always the relevant, that gets the best read.
A well-planned campaign will be well worth the forethought.