Do you really know what your email audience wants to read?

19th February 2010 | Posted in Marketing communications

Interestingly, it seems that what marketers think is valuable as email marketing content isn’t necessarily what technology buyers want to see.

According to report from MarketingSherpa (content available only for a couple of weeks), there’s quite a bit of difference in perception of what achieves clickthrough.

Here are a few email marketing suggestions based on their findings:

• Do offer links to educational content and free research reports, but consider what to send and at what point in the buying cycle to send it – buyers like white papers and research reports, but possibly not as much as you think they do, and they don’t much like being overwhelmed
• Think more about links to industry news and articles – a quick personalised email note with a link to an interesting article goes down pretty well according to this research, and helps you stay in touch
• Do offer competitive buying tools and comparisons, because although they’re not quite as important as you might think to buyers, they still are considered useful
• Promotional content is good – but don’t confuse it with educational content
• Look and feel of the email body content itself can affect whether you get the clickthroughs – highlighting key words and phrases is reported to be very effective, especially those that link to more information