Are your marketing emails truly valuable?

Approachs to increase the value of your email messages Part 1 Emotional value

Subscribers give you an address, attention and access to the inner sanctum that is their inbox. And they expect something in return. Some kind of value from your emails.

This value ensures you don't outstay your welcome in that inbox and drives responses, whether direct (e.g. sales) or indirect (e.g. awareness).

No surprise, then, to find email marketing experts regularly admonishing senders to increase the value of their messages. It's one of the ways I highlighted to ensure email success in 2011.

Your options for increasing value?

For many experts, the answer lies in using technology to increase the functional "transactional" value of an email. Which largely means better targeting through integration of web analytics, customer databases and email systems...supporting segmentation, personalized offers/content, one-to-one trigger messages etc.

That's quite a mouthful and quite a challenge for those without the resources.

But it's not your only option. Far from it!

In our technocratic world, we forget that value to a reader isn't just about how targeted the offer or content is.

The Mona Lisa won't help me do my job better or address my immediate shopping needs. But I'll pay good money to see it.

And therein lies your chance...

The value that really matters?

Best practice email marketing tends to focus on functional elements and refining content and offers to better target the recipient. This takes you a long way but has natural limits.

You can (and should) optimize your address acquisition, welcome emails, designs, content, offers, subject lines, from headers etc...but still most of your list will not click, download, register or buy.

That's because you need to reach the recipient at exactly the right time, when they're in the right frame of mind, with the right need. It's very hard to plan for those factors, though the right segmentation approach helps.

You can, however, also address emotional value: the softer elements of value that best practice guides rarely cover. Such aspects as style, personality, surprise, creativity, storytelling, entertainment, humor.

The aim is to build an emotional connection that keeps readers involved, even if the intrinsic offer or content isn't relevant this time.

Of course, this is easier said than done. We don't all have the ingenuity and creativity of a Leonardo da Vinci.

That's another reason we focus on functional value: it's easier to create, track and analyse. And there are lots of tools to help us increase functional value. There aren't many tools to help us decide how to present offers and content in a way that engages the emotions of the recipient.

So what's an email marketer to do? Here are three tips:

Think people, not data

The tools and technology lure us into a spreadsheet philosophy, where subscribers are no longer living, breathing humans, but a combination of letters and numbers with an @ in the middle.

Email addresses have no feelings, no emotions, no needs and no desires. But people do. And your subscribers are...people (mostly).

If you simply continually remind yourself of this fact, then you automatically start to account for human needs and emotions in your email campaign design, planning and execution.

Think personality

Go on, add personality to your emails.

Would that it were so easy...it's like saying, "Reduce stress". Easily said, but how?

It's not as tricky as it sounds, though. It doesn't mean you must produce an all-singing, all-dancing missive that has recipients printing off copies to show friends and relatives.

It just means doing anything to steer your emails away from the bland sales or corporate writing and design style that dominates most inboxes. If you take away the factual content of your email, what makes it stand out from the competition?

To avoid the lure of mediocrity, simply consider more use of the human voice in your copy. It doesn't need Pulitzer prize-winning writing: just remember that the subscriber reads as an individual and should be talked to as such.

Get creative and innovate

Ah, two more ideas that are easy to recommend, harder to implement.

Again, the important step is simply to recognize and reject the pull of mediocrity. Work toward a mindset or production environment that actively encourages unique, memorable, engaging campaigns, irrespective of the actual offers or content.

It certainly helps here to draw inspiration from the work of others. For example:

• Stunning graphics
• Quirkiness
• Horizontal fun
• Text-only approaches
• Nice animation

...and here are a further 22 sites that serve as inspiration for creative and innovative email marketing designs and tactics.

Of course, just as an offer needs to be tuned to the audience, so does personality, creativity etc. Your email promoting vacations for the over-70s probably shouldn't come across like it was written by a rapper on acid (though the results might be interesting).

Elements designed to boost emotional value, just like those designed to boost functional value, need testing and need to deliver, results wise.

Next month, Part 2 will discuss some more ways to improve the value of your emails without necessarily investing heavily in technology.