Email Marketing: How to Stay Personal and Relevant to Your Customers

 

As the number of Millennials in the U.S. workforce increases, the more valuable these consumers become to your business as they obtain the responsibility and the pure adrenaline rush of joy of spending their hard-earned income. Of course your company will want to target these consumers, generally 18-33 years of age, with your marketing efforts, but there’s a catch: never has a demographic been more bombarded and thereby turned-off by media advertisements and gimmicks than the Millennials. Email may seem to be a fantastic way to keep tabs on this group of consumers, as 98% of Millennials check their email every few hours. But email marketing can become dangerously close to being considered spam for even your most loyal customers, Millennials and otherwise, when improperly executed. Thankfully, best practices have been implemented by customer-savvy companies that can revolutionize the way you use this tried-and-true method of communication to reach your customers, whatever their generation happens to be.

These new practices can be summarized with one word: personalization. And while it may seem to be asking too much to make every individual message personal to your customers, new technology has enabled ways to streamline this process so it can be realistically done. In what is known as cross-channel marketing, companies can utilize automated services in order to collect information on what consumers are buying from them, allowing marketers to email customers with unique, targeted offers that can help drive both business and the overall relationship. For the uninitiated, it may seem a little awkward to be collecting this kind of information, but it actually saves your consumers time and money in the long run— if someone is already buying something from your website, wouldn’t they want to hear about relevant products and services in the near future, especially if it’s at a discount and a frequently bought item or service? As a business, you want to stay in the mind of your easily distracted customers, and there’s no better way to do so than to be seen as a helpful and useful friend.

While building out your new email campaign to target Millennials and other tech-savvy consumers no matter the age, keep in mind the following pointers, courtesy of the Harvard Business Review. First, make sure your emails are friendly to mobile devices—88% of Millennials use their smartphones to check their email, so you want your own communication to be compatible with this trend. Time your emails for key points in the day, such as around bedtime when many consumers are checking their email before going to sleep. Make sure to use pictures, and to keep your emails concise; don’t let the curse of TL, DR (too long, didn’t read, for you non-Millennials out there) become the conversation killer for your campaign.

You don’t need to have gone to Harvard to know how to stay in touch with your consumers, but you do want a team to expedite the process as much as possible so you can focus on running your business. That’s where the dedicated professionals of Sun Sign Designs make the online world simple for your company. Reach out us today to see how we can construct a world class email campaign together with you!