OMG!! I’ve Been Pacing the Floor Waiting for Your E-mail Marketing Message!

At Marketing Sherpa’s recent summit on e-mail marketing, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin offered this observation: “No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I sure hope I get a lot of great email marketing messages today.’”

That’s clever and funny!

As much as we’d like to think that our prospects are pacing around their office, hand clenched behind their back, muttering about the lack of marketing messages they’ve received from your firm, the truth is that all of our inboxes have become cluttered, and there’s only  a short window of opportunity between delete and unsubscribe to capture that eyeball.

Here’s a short list of tips that can help in increasing the effectiveness of your e-mail

1. Make your subject line funny and compelling
2. Don’t just promote, use e-mail to educate and deliver thought leadership for firm and personal brand building
3. Make sure your message is relevant and targeted to the audience your trying to reach
4. Clean, simple and uncluttered layout
5. Be considerate and avoid fatiguing prospects with the frequency of your e-mails
6. Use links in your e-mail to invite prospects back to your website
7. Consider testing different versions of your e-mails to a small sample of your target market, measure results, and then select the  version that generates the greatest open rates for a the rest of the targets in your database
8. Use different types of messaging and content to nature prospects through the sales funnel
9. If presenting an offer in the e-mail (i.e. get a whitepaper), make sure that here is a clear problem and solution presented  and that the benefits of the solution are clearly articulated
10. Make clickable elements in your e-mail obvious because you cannot assume your audience knows where to click.

When it comes to using e-mail as part of a professional services firm marketing program, there are three tendencies I see that minimize effectiveness: (1) an overly conservative approach in terms of subject lines, (2) offers that are presented in dull and awkward ways, and (3) the use of complicated technical jargon that is a show stopper when it comes to compelling the reader to take the next steps in the relationship.

E-mail marketing is a combination of art and science, and the problem of inbox clutter is making its use as a centerpiece of professional services marketing harder and harder. For many firms, it turns out that the person pacing the floor, wringing their hands, is not the prospect – it’s the partner that‘s wondering why their attempt to build their niche using e-mail isn’t working!