Have you ever been asked if you need Baseball equipment… before being asked if you even play the game?

I was at a restaurant recently when the waiter asked if I would be interested in a chocolate fudge brownie with ice cream. Now we’re talking, right? Well…although this sounds delectable, my intolerance to lactose would far outweigh any short-term happiness from this dessert. If this waiter were a friend of mine, I might even be a little offended or assume it’s a joke.

I say this because I have been on the waiter’s side before, eager to share something of value with a prospect or customer. But if I skip asking important questions, I run the risk of wasting everybody’s time and offending others. So, how does this apply to marketing, and specifically email marketing?

 1.  We need to determine our primary target market and focus our resources there. It doesn’t take a fancy statistic to know email is growing rapidly and email marketing is a viable option, but I will        include one anyway.  Did you know that email ad revenue reached $156 million in 2012 (Interactive Advertising Bureau via Salesforce.com)?

 

2. Now that we know our target audience, how will we effectively deliver the message so that it is received? We know that people are very busy, and we only have a few seconds to grab a prospects attention. An effective strategy is to keep subject lines short and sweet. Subject lines of fewer than 10 characters long had an open rate of 58% (Adestra July 2012 Report).

 

3. Part of knowing your Target Market is knowing how they think and how they access their email. 64% of decision makers read their email via mobile devices (TopRankBlog). With this in mind, email marketing strategies must include appropriate text versions as well as HTML versions.

 

  1. When marketing your company/services, one must remember that listening, asking questions, and getting to know our target market is far more important
    than simply offering a chocolate fudge brownie with ice-cream. Your prospect may prefer these:

Check out the recipe at :YUM