The Power of Email Marketing
Annual Industry Events
To learn more about multichannel campaigns, check out the MineThatData blog. http://minethatdata.blogspot.com/
Many of us work in industries that follow relatively fixed annual cycles, where certain things take place at the same time each year.
Since we know about such cycles/events well in advance, we can plan individual emails or multi-email campaigns to send in the time leading up to (and in some instances after) them.
Major industry conferences and trade shows
Other Consumer or Product Cycles
A publisher in the music industry might send an email newsletter about the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference (occurs every March); if you write about cars, you might put a campaign together around the North American International Auto Show (each January); golf experts could talk about The Masters.
Other industry cycles work well, too. Are you an accountant? Create a campaign to send your subscribers from January up until (and through) Tax Day. Winery? Let readers follow the winemaking process along from harvest through crushing, pressing, aging and bottling.
Don't Forget Holidays!
Industry-specific events aren't the only annual occurrences that you can work into your email marketing calendar.
Holidays, while they shouldn't be a cause of empty greetings, can provide a backdrop for thought-out campaigns.
Many businesses create a series of emails for the "12 Days of Christmas"
The floral, candy and jewelry industries are known for putting together strong campaigns in the months leading up to Valentine's Day, but this holiday can work well for anyone marketing a unique product/gift idea.
Creating email marketing campaigns around the holidays may sound tired/trite to some of you — and in some cases, it is — but in my experience it's all about the planning and execution, and how narrowly you define "holidays."
For more holiday ideas, check out our holiday marketing calendar. It contains plenty of celebrations that you might never have considered…
"Special Features" — Narrowly-Focused Email Campaigns
Just as in other media, you can drill down to one particular area within the broader focus of your email newsletter and publish a group of articles on that topic.
Example: our features on email marketing for doctors, restaurants and realtors.
This type of "special feature" (to borrow the term from more traditional media) can be a welcome diversion from your typical email newsletter content, and grab the interest of particular groups of subscribers.
Are you a travel agent? Highlight 5 destinations that offer exceptional value. Interior decorator? Show how different color palettes can make a room exciting, calming, bigger, smaller, and so on. A woodworking expert could take a little-used wood and showcase 3 projects that your readers can tackle using it.
The beauty of special features is that they:
Spice up your email newsletter.
Have natural cohesiveness, making it easy for you to keep your content relevant (example: a 5-part series on "readying your classic car for the next show" gives you 5 emails that logically tie together).
Give you plenty of email content to spread over multiple messages and keep in touch with subscribers while providing value.
Unless your email newsletter focuses on so narrow a topic that there's absolutely no room to vary your individual message content, you can benefit from this type of campaign.
(If you think your email newsletter's focus is too narrow to do this, please explain in the comments… I'd like a shot at giving you some ideas for possible "special feature" campaigns!)
To be continued…
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Posted by: Lisa411 | June 04, 2008 at 07:13 PM