A Valentine’s Day Message: Are we falling in love with email again?

Email inboxes have become a true horror story for many of us.  The flood continues, and it’s getting to be a daily chore to manage the flow of information.  So that presents a problem for those of us who rely on email marketing as an important lever of lead generation.  In fact, for the last few years, most companies have seen a steady decline in click through rates from a 6% overage to something more in the 3% range.

So imagine our surprise when we ran our 2013 year-end numbers and found that among the 3 million emails distributed by our agency, click through rates actually INCREASED to 4%, reversing the trend toward lower response rates.  Does that mean the overflow is lessening?  Not likely.  What it does mean is that the tailored approach we and others are taking to email content creation is having an effect.  Rather than general blasts, the careful segmentation and improved messaging we and others are producing are making emails more relevant, more tied to customer pain points.  If our approach is always to generate that helps me do my job better, then the value of the email content being distributed to our customers and prospects means people respond more.

Hubspot’s tagline of creating content that people love is certainly hard to do, but an important foundation of what we write and produce today.  Gone are the promotional ‘me-focused’ messages in favor of writing something that truly is valuable for people to read.  Just as Google is re-indexing their search engine rankings to favor the most relevant content, people are self-filtering to only read the most relevant emails.  A worthwhile rallying cry for us all – make 2014 the year of Being Relevant!