The Importance of Specificity in Email Marketing

Email marketing has changed since the early days when it was less about customization and more about numbers. In today’s world, a B2B marketing strategy has become more about providing specific content to particular readers. Emails have the power to influence purchasing decisions.

Internet marketing benefits
To bring this about, it’s important to focus on customer conversation. Daniel Faggella, writing in MarketingProfs, explains that there are different ways to look at this process. Some companies will offer customized prices depending on what they are selling. For businesses that custom-build machines for a specific process, or offer a very niche service, then conversion really focuses on driving customers to react to calls to action by picking up the phone and contacting someone in the company or beginning the process of buying a product from the website.

One way to drive conversion is to make the barrier to entry lower for customers who are wary of sharing their email addresses. Instead of having people write in with particular frustrations with the way service has been offered in the past, companies can fill out a survey or a Web form. This way, companies that are afraid of sending in their email addresses because of the possibility of receiving spam can avoid doing so. At the same time, they may check back to see the results of the survey.  By having an online page with updated content, businesses can drive interest by engaging with the trends of the industry with which the company works. This can also improve customer loyalty because there will be regular information that people can read to learn more.

Email marketing as a method for driving sales growth
Ultimately, the goal is to provide something for possible customers that falls between giving out an email address and passively reading content. Once the people reading the content feel confident enough in the product that they offer their email address to begin receiving newsletters, the real potential for conversion has begun. In this situation, it helps to remember the funnel approach. Begin with a broad, generalized subject matter, and then narrow the focus to the customers’ own interests. If the customer clicks on certain items in the email, then good marketing software with plenty of room for customizing content will send another email at a later time with more specialized information about those products specifically.

When content topics are narrowed, you can directly target individuals’ specific interests. In essence, the form email marketing takes is a conversation. Ideally, it is the best way to attract new customers.

Writing the perfect letter
Stefanie Isabel Kobsa, of Business 2 Community, recently explored the ways companies can write the best possible emails for marketing purposes. In essence, her proposal is that we write our emails like letters that we send through the post. In other words, make the content as clear and easy to read as possible. Your website and your email copy should contain no mistakes or awkward phrasings. Graphics and social media accounts should be presented cleanly and effectively. Things should look attractive, in other words. Everything should look as professional as possible. Following that, hone in on the specificity of the paragraphs that are going to be sent to different people based on how they interact with your website. This means that you should avoid overlapping information whenever possible.  It should come across as one cohesive letter. A newsletter format is a good approach for this because they are often written section by section.

Special attention should be paid to the title and the opening paragraph not only because people will see those first, but because Google will soon be sorting mail more rigorously, looking for specific keywords to organize information in a very dynamic way. Soon, there will be a preview screen for many people who use Gmail Inbox, which will include the first paragraph.

Making your letter stand out
Ideally, according to Kobsa, your letter should stand out from similar ones as much as possible. How you do this is up to you, but using specificity will help because it will drive the reader’s interest. Rather than a generic letter, your ideal reader will receive a very particular piece of information from the content of your email. This will lead to a further conversation when the reader clicks on links in the email that result in another email with additional custom content. Basically, the goal is to inspire the reader to keep clicking through emails to learn more about a product. As the sales funnel narrows, the interest in the product rises because people are getting very specific information about something that interests them in a very particular way.

When emails are too general or there isn’t a back and forth, then people will lose interest in a product because they aren’t getting the information they need.