Email Marketing: A View from the Inbox
by Richard Barrett
If you are doing email marketing campaigns, you need to understand the inbox of your email recipients. If you can think like your recipient, and sit in his chair as he works his way through a huge stack of email, then you will succeed. In this post we will follow Jim Easterbrook, the Director of Internet Security at Midwest Regional Bank.
Some background: Midwest Regional Bank avoided the debt meltdown, did not take any loans from the Federal government, and had minimal exposure to consumer real estate loans. So now Midwest Regional Bank is growing rapidly, gaining new depositors who like its independence from Congress and gaining new business clients, too. Because businesses are fleeing banks that took Federal loans, Midwest Regional can choose the most creditworthy businesses as its new customers.
Jim has a big problem. He’s swamped with work and his inbox is swamped with emails. He cleaned it out Friday afternoon, only to see another 500 emails waiting for him on Monday morning.
Here’s what happens to them
- Jim’s spam filter automatically sorts about 350 emails into his spam folder. He plans to sort through the spam for any interesting emails, but somehow never has the time. Therefore, if the filter calls it spam, then Jim will never see it. (You can keep your email out of his spam folder, and we will talk more about this in a future post.)
- There are about 50 emails from coworkers, suppliers, or customers. Jim responds to these high-priority emails immediately, and then starts dealing with the remaining 100 emails, all lower priority from external sources. Your email probably falls into this bucket.
- Jim set up several rules in his Outlook (the company-selected email application) to help him manage the email. These automatic rules sort about 60 into various folders, such as community, professional and industry. These emails are typically newsletters, meeting notices, and professional correspondence that Jim handles in the evenings when he has time.
- Your email is one of the one of the remaining forty sitting unsorted and mostly unwanted in his inbox. Jim’s goal is to clean out these forty emails in five minutes, so your first email to him will get only about 5-10 seconds of his time.
First Email – Six Spam Tests
Jim uses a simple set of six external cues to evaluate an email before opening it.
Email title – Make it direct, specific, relevant, and plain. Jim intuitively recognizes certain words and phrases as spam. If he sees “free,” “limited time, “dear friend,” or other key phrases, he hits the spam button immediately. Your email should contain some information of value to Jim, and the title should reflect that content.
Recipient Email Address – Send business information to Jim’s business email. Jim has both personal and business email addresses. If your email went to jimeasterbrook0057@aol.com or any other ISP provider (comcast.net, msn.com, yahoo.com, etc.) he will delete it immediately. Take the time to find his business email address and send business emails there.
Sender Name – Make it personal. Your email should not come from the marketing department or the service team. Your email should come from a real, live person, preferably the CEO or an appropriate vice president in your organization.
Sender Email Address – Be transparent. The email address should always match the sender name; Jim unconsciously checks for this. If the sender is Fred Broomfield, then Jim expects to see fbroomfield@ or fredb@ in the email prefix. Jim is looking for any reason to hit the delete button, so the email address must be obvious and transparent.
Email size and attachments – Small is beautiful, but attachments are ugly. As a sender, you are requesting time from the recipient. Jim always checks the email size, so keep it short, polite and respectful. He does not have time to read long emails and any attachment gets it deleted immediately.
Congratulations, your email passed all of Jim’s mental spam filter tests, so he did not delete it immediately. In fact, Jim moved the email into his “To Read Later” folder. But don’t get too excited. That folder gets pretty full and Jim seldom has time to read the emails in it. Typically, he just empties the folder every week or so, without reading many of them.
Build a Relationship
The important thing is that with this first email you have started building a long-term relationship with Jim. Keep it up. Next week we will see how Jim handles the next few emails he receives from you.
