Content Is King
“The medium is the message.”

–Herbert Marshall McLuhan, www.marshallmcluhan.com/main.html

Yes, for those of you who remember McLuhan’s adages and predications about the approaching information age in the ‘60s, he’s still right on the money. (If you’ve never heard of him, check out the Web site above.)

Anyway, just the way real estate is all about ‘location, location, location,’ successful e-marketing is all about the message.

“To keep messages from being thrown out with the rest of the clutter, marketers need to focus on three things: understanding delivery, creating relevant content, and giving customers what they want,” says Gartner analyst Adam Sarner.

Understanding delivery:

• Continually keep lists updated. Remove addresses that bounce more than twice. Use every information gathering opportunity (forms, invitations, phone conversations, etc.) to ask for current email addresses.
• Scour your list for potential issues (incomplete, old/invalid or mistyped addresses).
• Cultivate relationships with the major ISPs to keep your organization white-listed.
• Designate a specific email address to use as the ‘send’ address every time for the same email types. For example, for your newsletters create an email account just for sending, such as newslettername@organizationname.com.
• Find out potential red flag Spam words for your subject lines (e.g., sale, special, discount, cruise, etc.).
• Run diagnostics using a content delivery application, such as MagnetMail or EmailExam.

Creating relevant content

No one wants to read just your organization’s news—especially events that have already occurred. Although readers of your e-publications are obviously vested in your organization, click-through research suggests these are the most frequently read types of articles (in order):

1) New product/service announcements.
2) Upcoming events information and breaking news about your organization.
3) Industry trend stories.
4) How-to tips.

Give ’em what they want

Listen to your readers:

* You can gauge subscribers’ interests by noting which types of articles they click through to for more information. Steer your content in future issues to reflect readers’ interests.
* Monitor what types of inquiries your staff receives from different groups of stakeholders. Your emails and e-newsletters are your opportunity to address these questions and be a leading source of information about your industry.

Take advantage of dynamic content functions within your email delivery application. Within your e-newsletter cover emails, for instance, you can set up MagnetMail to send specific content to different segments of your readership. If aren’t familiar with creating audience-targeted emails, contact your account consultant to add this powerful, affordable e-marketing feature.