Email Marketing Under Pressure – 3 Ways to Beat the Clock and Keep Your Readers Happy

You’re a busy marketer, whether for yourself or for your clients. You don’t have time to write a weekly email newsletter that’s compelling and thoughtful enough to keep all your readers happy every time they get something from you/your client. So what do you do? Where does the content come from? Who is in charge of writing that stuff anyway? Do you just scrape your most recent blog posts/new products/left over spaghetti salad?

1. Keep Your Readers Happy Do you like getting emails that are always about some new great product that will help you do this or that, which only costs an extra $49.99? Or what about the emails about the latest accomplishments of Company XYZ after winning the greatest bowling championship in Tennessee? I don’t personally, and I’ll go out on a limb and assume that most of you don’t either, at least not all the time. So tip #1: send emails that aren’t about you yourself and I sometimes. How? 2. Content curation Baby! This means exactly what you think it does; repurpose other people’s content, or some of your own, and put it together in “The Latest Tips from John Hancock’s Marketing Brain” (You probably shouldn’t use that subject line, though). I like to use some specialized tools that I built just for this purpose, but if you want a freebie, then check out this content strategy generator. It scrapes and gathers relevant social stories about any keyword you type into it. It saves tons of time! 3. Analytics Yes, you have to look at your stats. If you’re not tracking which stories and links people are clicking on the most when you send out an email, how are you going to know what they like and want? No amount of automated search queries and content curation will make up for not looking at your stats on open rates, subject lines, content, design and links clicked. This is where at least 1/2 of your time should be spent, so that you have to spend less time thinking about pleasing your audience and it just happens because the numbers don’t lie. So if you want to get as good at email marketing as you are at search marketing, you have to treat it with care and use some good tools to help you keep it fresh.