A problem email marketers have is that every time they send an email it’s got to be perfect. Everyone has to open, click and buy for success and if one person doesn’t it’s because we weren’t relevant. So, if you send more email are you not reducing the need for each individual email to be perfect in its performance?
People might be on vacation when an email arrives or busy doing any other number of things. If you put an ad on TV, do you care that people might not be in front of the TV to see every single spot as it’s aired? Of course not, that won’t stop you from advertising, it probably means you’ll advertise more to increase chances of connecting.
Branding makes people do things and it doesn’t matter that the message is not relevant to a specific person on a particular day. Branding creates a relationship between what your product is and a potential need now or in the future of a consumer. In advertising who worries about there being too many billboards and thus decides to do less billboard advertising?
While speaking at i-SCOOP’s 2011 Fusion Marketing Experience, in Brussels, Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx, drove home his message that branding in email marketing is powerful. For example, Dela is not a gamer and knows nothing about the Xbox 360, but he has been exposed to their marketing/branding efforts (via a radio station his daughters listen to). When one of his daughters wanted a video game system it was a no-brainer because Dela already knew what the device could do and it was front and centre in his mind due to repetitive advertising from Microsoft.
Selling more thanks to the power of inbox branding?
Dela’s simple message is that sending more email works. This statement (obviously) provoked quite some reaction as you can see in the social media monitoring report of the event and it is a bold one, but what we noticed was that Dela’s arguments provoked people to think and resulted in his presentation being appreciated, even by people who disagreed with the statement.
Your our open rates may drop and your CTRs may drop, but thanks to the power of inbox branding, you’ll sell more. That doesn’t mean you don’t do segmentation and targeting. What it means is that you should be using segmenting and targeting to make customers tolerate more email.
People don’t and won’t love your email marketing any more than people love ads on TV. People don’t love advertising, people tolerate it. Branding is about influencing behaviour and getting people to buy the products you want them to buy, when you want them to buy.
Dela makes a good case for the power of inbox branding and increased email send rates. As with all the speakers at the Fusion Marketing Experience, Dela makes you think and reconsider the status quo.
