October 2021 - Gethrough

Easy ways to write emails

Always keep it Short and to the Point

People will be racing against time everyday and majority of the online crowd will not have sufficient time to read through a long email. This is why it’s important to have the emails short and to the point. This will not only encourage them to read through it but also get their attention.

Be Polite

Readers are always inclined towards a polite approach rather than a commanding one. It’s important to have the politeness conveyed via the email you write to your audience as well. It should appeal the reader and encourage them to read more of your mails.

It’s also important that the information which you share via your emails are true to your knowledge. Conveying wrong information will deceive the reader, and once the trust is lost it’s very difficult to retain the user.

Begin your email with a greet using their first names . Calling people with the first name will always add a personal touch to your emails. It’ll make the user on the other end feel that they have received the email from a person and not an automated machine.

Use professional language, Avoid country specific slangs or harsh words in your email.

Get Personal

Share something personal like a customer success story or an employee effort to bring out the benefits or to justify the advantages for using your product / services.

Customer success stories are one of the best approach to convince other potential customers into investing in your product / services.

While writing customer story, there are few points which needs to be considered, Some of them are as follows,

Problems faced by the customer before using your product
How they came across your product
How your product or service help them with the transformation
Include images relevant to your product to make it more convincing
Share the Review of the customer after using your product or service
Share visual / analytical data of the results from your customers on using your product / services.

It is also important to talk about the people who are responsible for building / supporting your product. Stories about the development of the product and the people behind it will inspire customers and will increase the probability to invest/ buy in the same.

While writing stories about people behind your product, Following are some points that needs to be considered:

A analytical data of the effort your employees have put in to create your product
Time spent on QA and the process of QA which was taken care to ensure that the customer only gets the best
The backstories of your employee and what inspires them to work on the product

Decide Email Objective

Before you start any emails, it’s important that you have a target on what that particular email should achieve or what impact it should have on the people who reads it.

The end goal can be anything. It varies from industry to industry. Some of the common objectives behind emails are as follows,

An important page from your website related to the content in the email
Links to Your social media accounts that will promote your business
Redirect them to your Sign up or subscribe landing page when the customer clicks the respective buttons.
Redirect them to your blog to explain further about your product / services

Always Review and A/B test

Now you have a perfectly described and well explained email but a flaw within the email has been noticed by one of your customer, In some scenarios this will have a huge impact on your entire email campaign. So attention to details is the most crucial element while drafting any emails. Especially while running mass email campaigns.

Some generic mistakes which can be avoided, Follows,

Make use of the spell check extension to automatically reduce / Highlight all the errors.
Recheck your emails multiple times to ensure that you have excluded any unnecessary words or links.
Validate typos.
Including an HD image in your email may not be viewable from all your audience’s devices. It’s important that you always have cross compatible content in your email.

It’s also important that you have an analytic data from your previous email campaigns. This data can be used to improve new campaigns and furthermore, it can be used to perform A/B test on the emails to get a theoretical understanding of which version appeals the customer more.

Know your audience

With the help of A/B testing you will have a better understanding of your audience. Once you have understood your audience, it’s all about getting an idea of what you need to present to your audience to get their attention.

If you are selling a product that demands or related to visual attraction, then your emails should be as attractive and thematically represent your product. On the contrary, if you are selling a product or service that’s on a professional level, then your email should be precise and well structured with right words.

You can always get a fair understanding on the needs and requirement of your audience with the help of A/B testing. Focusing on what aspects of your email gets the attention of your audience and prioritising your information towards that aspect is how you redirect your customer towards your products.

Capture Audience Attention

Find the fastest way to get the attention of your audience who are viewing your emails. Fast meaning less than a second. That’s a really short time! So how do you get that attention in such a short period ? the subject and starting sentences of your mail should be precise and enticing

The subject has to be something which your users can relate to or something they are interested towards. When you share details about your product in the description, don’t be robotic about it. Get a little personal, explain it as you will to another person.

If your aim is generating traffic to your website, then you need to be honest with your customers. If you want them to click a link to your website or blog, you should include that link in your description with it as a point of focus. Don’t mislead your customers. Have limited but focused information with hyperlinks that will point to the essentials on your website / blog.

Include An Essential Signature

Your email ends with a signature. Ending doesn’t always have to be fancy. It can be as simple as just your name. The best signatures are the ones which are plain and simple.

Including your phone number, email on your signature will open doors for communication between potential customers and your organization. Have your First and Last name in the signature as a standard. Ensure that you Include a link to your social network profiles to open wider communication channels.

What is Email Appends?

Mail appending, also known as e-appending, is a marketing practice that involves taking known customer data (first name, last name, and postal address) and matching it against a vendor’s database to obtain email addresses. These collected email addresses will then be later used to run marketing campaigns. Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_appending

An email appending involves combining a database of list of contact that includes names, address and phone numbers with the database of a vendor email listing to get one reliable source that will have all email information. The success of email appending depends on the quality of both the databases being merged.

Email Append Best Practices to Keep in Mind

One of the important rules to consider when it comes to B2C data is that the “opt-in” rules still apply. If you send emails to new customers who haven’t opted for your services/messages, you’re probably going to irritate a lot of people. Continuing to do so will result in losing people rather than developing better relationships with them. Maintaining a record for opted-in data will effectively increase the reach of your potential audience by excluding the people who have opted out from your emails.

Email addresses are only valuable if they offer the company a viable channel of communication by being continually deliverable. According to experts, email marketing databases generally degrade by about 22.5% each year. There are 3 Important rules to keep in mind to get the best results from Email Append:

Append Only Your Customers

You must have an existing relationship with an individual in order to benefit from email append. If you try to append a list of contacts who are entirely new or haven’t heard about your organization at all, you might receive bad remarks for your IP, lose potential customers and gain a bad reputation for your organization. Best practice is to appending current customers with whom you’ve had a recent exchange. It is also important to keep track / exclude the unsubscriber list so that their data don’t fall into your email Append.

Reliable Data Provider

With regards to Data, always consider vendors who use permission-based data collected from lawful sources, where consumers agreed to share their information with third parties. Do a background check from the companies where you are trying to acquire data. A good data provided will also have the location information of the customers and the same will be validated as well. Going with Reliable data provider will decrease your chances of targeting non-responsive mailing list.

Be Minimal in Your Permission Request Email

A permission request is the introductory email message sent to the matched customer to gain his or her consent in being added to your email program. This email should focus on highlighting the benefits of giving permission to be on your email list, and set expectations for future content and frequency. This email should be focusing on selling only your brand and relationship with the customer and not your products. Await confirmation from the customer before initiating the sales cycle.

What is Data Append?

Data Append or data cleansing is a practice or method involved to ensure that your email database is unique and reliable to get the best possible ROI from email marketing campaigns. This is done by deleting outdating information and also by overwriting repeated or duplicate data. Data cleansing is an important element to achieve growth in email marketing.

Email databases in every organization gradually decay every year due to various reasons such as updated job title, company, location, address etc. In order to be efficient in email marketing campaigns, You’ll have to own a database which is updated, reliable and made up of responsive contacts so that it will increase your chances of receiving maximum leads.

Increasing the number of contacts in your email list and updating it with other missing customer information such as their address, phone number, and name will grow your customer database with much more efficient information. but doing so will also increase the potential risk of having duplicate or outdated data in your list which will not help you during your campaigns in any way. This is why Data appending is important to ensure that you don’t only have the last list of customer database but also a reliable list.

Why Data Append?

Data append will help you have a set of information which will not only help you get in touch with your customer database but to build a better relationship with them.

With information like the customer location, name, age, and preferences, you can better sell your product and you’ll be in a better position to understand what the customer wants and sell better.

Data append ensures that you don’t have duplicate information and reduces effort from communication with contacts which doesn’t have an active user on the other end.

Some of the major benefits of data Append / Cleansing which helps in boosting the marketing campaigns are as follows:

Increase the reputation of your IP

When you send email to a responsive audience, they will spend their time to respond or read the email received from your IP.

Better IP Reputation
But not spamming your customer database, you have a better Reputation and the information you share will be valued

Your Email List Has Reliable Data
With the help of Data appending, your email list will also have more information regarding your audience which will help you in establishing a better communication line.

Increase Potential Leads
With the help of Data Append, to some extent, you will be able to identify the potential leads by using information such as their location and interests.

Guaranteed Email Delivery
Data Append will ensure that all the emails you send reach the customer inbox

Productive Marketing Campaigns
Due to the reliable information, your marketing campaigns yield productive results

Avoid being flagged as Spam
Avoiding duplicate emails will prevent your emails being sent to the same customer multiple times. This will prevent your IP from falling under the spam category.

Improvise Marketing strategies
When your marketing campaigns get productive due to the reliable target audience, you can improve your marketing strategy each time so your campaigns are always progressive in terms of response and sales.

Save Cost and Effort
Data Append will ensure that the effort which you’ve put into the campaigns is minimal and cost-efficient.

It is very important and been suggested by professional marketing experts to always append your customer database frequently to ensure that they are reliable and gives you maximum ROI.

Email Appending and Data append goes hand-in-hand which brings you the maximum returns from your target audience to your organization and also ensuring that your marketing strategies have reliable statistics which will help you progress faster.

14 guidelines for success in branding

Branding entails a procedure that entails an end-to-end, holistic philosophical think that covers a brand’s present market position, targeted positioning, the overall market scenario, identification of platforms to be targeted, understanding target audience, research on growth and demand, estimated investment and returns and implementation. Of course, there needs to be ample analysis after the implementation to measure success or failure and what steps need to be taken to cash in, consolidate or fix.

Here are fifteen guidelines you need to keep in mind while working on your company’s or product’s branding strategy:

Understand present market position:

To begin with you need to understand what people think and feel about your brand. What is the general response to it? What is the common response to conversations initiated about your brand. We’ve known and heard of people mistaking a brand based on its name to associate it with something completely different. You have to understand that a brand not just a name, a logo or a slogan. A brand is the brand in itself. It stands for and represents everything that the company (yes, the brand) is involved in.

Target positioning:

Who is your brand likely to find an audience with? What is your target audience? What segments of the society are likely to find value in your brand? Who are you communicating with? Who do you need to communicate with and how? These are some questions that you need to ask yourself and get answers before you can move to the next phase. It’s important for you to identify the strata or segment of audience you are targeting in order to streamline and make your brand communication more target centric and speak to the ones that will lend their ears.

Market research:

It’s also important to understand the position of the market. What are the current trends? What’s working? What’s failing? What has been the proverbial “has been”? What’s “in”? What’s the next big thing? What are people saying? What is being shared socially and accepted virally? Focusing on these key factors will give you an idea of the nature your campaign needs to adopt. It will give you a greater control over things and could even arm you with a back-up plan if needed.

Identification of platforms:

There are multiple platforms and methods available for promotions and advertisements. There’s television, radio, outdoor, magazine and newspaper advertising, online advertising, social media promotions, on ground events, pamphlets and other collateral to name a few. While it may be a good idea to try and exploit everything available, it’s important for you to identify what platforms are likely to bring you more attention and eye-balls. What is most conducive to your brand is what you have to chalk out to focus your attention (and monies) towards. It makes sense for a big brand to be everywhere. However, if you are on your way to being one or aspiring to eventually become a big player, the right way would be to start sensibly and don’t cause a self-burnout. Know your nature of services or products, understand the vagaries of your industry, study your target audience and make your decisions based on that.

Estimated investment:

After identifying the platforms of promoting your brand, you need to estimate how much you will be required to invest. The procedure is known – you meet established and leading players of the platform you wish to have your brand on, get estimated statistics, demographics and of course, financial quotes from them. You also need to figure out if you require additional human resources. That will give you an idea on how much you need to allocate for your investment. There is bound to be overheads that one does not (more like cannot) estimate at the start, so it would be a good idea to keep a sum separately allocated to overhead costs.

Estimated returns on investment:

After receiving the quotes and the initial haggling and bargaining is through, statistics and market research will tell you what your estimated return on investment is. Pricing is obviously an important aspect and often, it is matched with barters and strategic tie-ups. In wake of which, the budget obviously goes down, but you need to factor in the costs of the barter and strategic associations when you are calculating your returns. After all, cost is cost and a penny spent is indeed gone. All these factors need to be put together. The end amount that you receive is your estimated return on investment. You need to deduct the costs incurred from the estimated returns and that would be your profit margin. Sometimes, certain branding exercises are not only for profit, but for presence. Of course, presence will eventually lead to profit. But the immediacy is for presence. And when that is the governing factor, returns need to be calculated accordingly.

Implementation strategy:

Your overall plan to go ahead and implement your branding is your implementation strategy. The platforms you will use, the service providers and vendors you will engage, the resources you may need to hire, the time you will need to spend and the chalking out of daily, weekly and perhaps even monthly activity that would be required to bring things home. Everyone’s tasks and schedules need to be properly explained in great detail and everyone has to be made accountable for their responsibilities and roles that they have to play in the implementation of your brand positioning and branding exercise. What to include? Your branding exercise needs to include your brand name, the logo, creatives ideas that denote brand, designs, house color identification and related aspects that make your brand.

Brainstorming:

Creative ideation or brainstorming is one of those key sessions in a pre-branding scenario that can be both invigorating and liberating. It can get you and your team’s creative juices flowing and get things done.

Creative phase:

The creative phase is reputably to most fun and fulfilling phase of any branding activity. It allows one to explore their creative side and learn and unlearn several attributes. This phase involves choosing the right colors, the look and feel, the overall communication and how it fits, the size and shape of the communication, tag lines, logos and more.

Implementation:

The implementation phase is by far, the most important phase of any branding exercise. It is the make or break phase and getting your implementation is what matters. If you get it right, you have hit gold. If you get it wrong, then all the hours of planning, strategizing and brainstorming would have simply gone down the proverbial drain. This phase marks the availability of your brand insignia everywhere. It also constitutes how easily accessible your branding activity is.

Post implementation analysis:

After implementation, it is important for you to take some time and study how you have gone about things. A post-mortem of sorts if you may. You need to look upon points such as overheads in terms of costs, human resources, external resources and platforms. That is just one part of it. The most important part of this key aspect of a branding exercise is how successful your exercise has been.

How commonly are you found?

Are you clocking an increase in inquiries?
Are you registering increased responses?
What is the visibility that you are getting?
Has there been a marked increase in your sales?
Are people reacting and responding to your brand?
How did you fare in terms of estimated investment?
Are you getting more calls trying to find out more about your brand?
How do the returns on your investment add up compared to your estimations?
Is there a certain degree of familiarity in the market when your brand name is mentioned?

Branding activity never ends:

Branding activity truly never ends. It is an on-going phase that ensues you remaining fresh in the minds of your target audience. You need to adapt and move with the times. There may be key changes that you need to incorporate based on the success or failure of your previous exercise. It’s a continuous phase.

Usage policy:

You need to understand the importance of your brand and ensure that is it used with care and respect. There may be representations of your brand in media that may not give a good picture. You need to mention your branding policy and guidelines for usage.

Change but selectively:

The saying goes that nothing is constant except change. That holds good and change is important. However, you have to be very careful and selective about change. You need to first understand what level of understanding and brand connect you have been able to establish and how it will affect the way your target audience views you.