You’ve got your own problems. Haven’t we all? You, no doubt, want to concentrate on finding your own solutions rather than getting bogged down with someone else’s concerns. And who could criticise you?
Well I will. Your function, whatever it is that you sell or produce, should go some way to solving the problems of those on your email marketing lists. Solutions sell. If a potential customer is in difficulties because they don’t know how to respond to, for instance, the limitations imposed by a strict budget, then if you can offer them something at a price they can afford. you’ve probably made a sale.
There’s only one problem with this answer to all your problems and that’s that you don’t know what your customer’s current challenges are. The solution is, of course, to discover what’s bugging them. There are three main ways of going about this: asking them directly, deducing from the data on your email marketing lists, or setting up a click through which will indicate where they feel their needs are.
Asking someone what their problems are does not give dependable results. They are likely to lie. To say you have been unable to cope with a particular challenge is to say, clearly and precisely, that you have in some way failed. People don’t like doing that. I bet you don’t either.
We have oodles of data on our subscribers that can, and normally does, define that person sufficiently to target them for an email marketing campaign. It not only gives personal data, such as age, but also shows their likes, dislikes, and preferences. It’s marketing gold of course. However, the recent changes in working and living conditions due to the lockdown and its fallout mean that our data is no longer as accurate as it was. We need to update it, and rapidly.
The most accurate way of discovering what’s bothering a particular person, or indeed group of people, is to have a simple click through on a marketing email or enewsletter. If someone chooses that landing page, they’re interested.
Most commentators will suggest that normally you concentrate an email marketing campaign solely on completions as anything that dilutes this target is likely to mean fewer sales. Come to think of it, I’ve said that. But the critical point is the word normally as it means that you can go outside those limitations if there is a need to. The changes brought on by the Coronavirus response, I’d suggest, comes within that criterion.
The two extremes in the ways to discover what problems they are experiencing is to be subtle or overt. I am all for overt. If you want to know whether, for instance, photocopying costs are something particular subscribers are struggling with then a brief article in an enewsletter, headed ‘Hidden Office Costs’, with a click through to ‘Ways to cut photo copying costs’ will give you clear and precise indicators as to what might be useful to offer in your next email marketing campaign. Try it, and do it now.
