How to Make Your Email Marketing Genuine

Making email marketing seem genuine can be one of the biggest challenges for marketers. The very nature of it relies on the same format being sent to a large group of people. Readers know this so they can be excused for only reading the first line, deleting it straight away or even unsubscribing.

But it doesn't have to be this way. If you make your email marketing relevant and effective, recipients will be much more engaged with the content and see it as genuine brand communication.

So how can you create this authentic relationship with an email marketing strategy?

Is it targeted?

The most important part of any email marketing strategy is ensuring that it is targeted to key personas. To achieve this you'll need to accurately understand who your consumer base is and what you want the desired CTAs to be. Market research will help you build personas but customer feedback and analytics can also allow you to learn more about your audience and how they interact with your brand.

Larger or more diverse companies may have a number of personas, each of which has its own email marketing template. Segmenting your strategy in this way can make it much more effective and allows you to deliver a truly personalized campaign, which will get much higher levels of engagement. Understanding your target audience/s will allow you to build a strategy that genuinely answers queries, concerns or pain points consumers may have.

Is it relevant?

Relevance isn't just about ensuring that the content in emails is of interest to its recipients, though this is undeniably a key part of it. It's also about the various other elements that determine whether readers are engaged by your correspondence. For example;

• How often do consumers want to be contacted and for what reason?
• What time of day do they have time to read it?
• How much do they read before they click away?

These are all parts of understanding what makes something relevant to your target audience.

Of course, one of the most important elements is including a CTA that is relevant to the user. If you don't have actions or content that encourages the reader to follow through with it, you won't get the desired conversions or ROI you're looking for.

Is it effective?

To know whether your email marketing is effective you need to not only understand your audience but identify key objectives for each campaign. Knowing that consumers get fatigued from the onslaught of adverts and marketing materials they see every day, many brands have opted to abandon traditional email strategies.

Instead of going for a hard sell or packing marketing full of promotional details, businesses are using email strategies to create loyalty and advocacy among their consumer base.

There are a number of strategies to ensure your email marketing is engaging its recipients and it may not always be clear what the right method is. This is why it's crucial that analytics are set up to monitor and track the performance of email marketing strategies.