3 Keys to Creating Relevance

By AdStation | June 12th, 2014 | Categories: Email Marketing
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Email opens, click-throughs and success are directly related to how relevant your message is to your audience. Finding common ground can be difficult, but simple considerations can boost your ROI significantly. Create relevance with 3 simple tips:

Be strategic in your timing

The phrase timing is everything has multiple meanings in the digital space.

Change is always afoot, so timing can be crucial when it comes to technology adoption. Timing also means right time/right place. If you are having a special on breakfast tacos, sending a tweet at 2:30 in the afternoon to tell people about it is not going to work. An email sent a day too late for a coupon will do more harm than just causing your customers to miss an event; it sends the message that your company may not be reliable or trustworthy.

Being aware of your purchase cycle timing is also critical to delivering your message with relevancy. Someone selling coffee has a legitimate reason to test and see if a daily email or social post is effective because it’s likely a daily purchase—or could be made a daily purchase with the right marketing! Someone who is looking to buy a car is likely not doing so on a daily basis, so keeping top-of-mind daily is not as critical and needs to be considered. Much like a poorly timed email, too many emails is the number one reason people unsubscribe, and now you’ve lost this key communication channel!

Combining the right platform with the right timing and execution can be an easy win, as long as you understand the pros and cons of the platform and why it works for the customer. For example, video can be used across the entire customer lifecycle – leading the way with discovery all the way through to post-purchase loyalty by delivering the right information at the right time in a meaningful medium.

Create a sense of urgency

“Fear Of Missing Out,” or FOMO, is a key driver of participation and engagement in digital life. Fear of missing the hilarious viral video that is going around, fear of missing out on an exciting post on Facebook and fear of missing out on a great deal.

Similarly, “loss aversion” is an economic theory that suggests people prefer to avoid a loss to achieve gains, even if the outcome is the same. Creative copy, specifically in the subject line, is a primary component of loss aversion.

So is creating a sense of urgency. For example, tweak “Save 20% Now!” to “Don’t Miss Out! Last Chance to Save 20% Before the Sale Ends at Midnight!” Suggesting that supply is limited is another way to encourage customers to open your e-mail.

Your approach should be professional and respectful, not threatening. Subject lines that read, “You’re A Loser If …” probably won’t earn you any conversions, but very well might earn you a complaint.

Get personal

“Hello, [friend]! Thanks for stopping by [store name] [today] and purchasing [item name]!”

Ugh. The above “reimagining” of a thank-you email is cringe-worthy. Here is a company that had the tools to use personalization and didn’t – and surely did not succeed in making the recipient feel valued as a customer.

Personalization of messages delivers results. Emails with personalization  – think “Hello, Danny! Welcome to the Puppet of the Week Newsletter!” versus “Dear Customer”.

Personalization isn’t just a name – it can be drawn from prior activities, past online behaviors or profile information from a social site.

Retargeting ads are a popular form of highly successful personalization – those three pairs of shoes you put in your abandoned shopping cart are now appearing in an ad next to the article you are reading – with a coupon!

A multiplatform approach to personalization will give you the most impact – a video can be personalized with an overlay of content from a site visit, tweets can (and should) call out individual users when it’s meaningful.

All of these can be confusing and overwhelming, and when used without expertise can scare off a user, so sometimes it pays to find an experienced partner.