In this age of digital hyper-connectivity, forging an intimate relationship with your audience is essential if your brand plans on standing out in a crowded inbox. Despite this fact, nearly half of all organizations still send the exact same email marketing content – word for word – to each member of their respective contact lists.If you’re sitting on the other side of this screen and thinking to yourself, “Wait, isn’t that how we do things?” then it’s time to pump the brakes a little bit before your next fire off your next email blast or piece of promotional content. Otherwise, you run a serious risk of letting homogenization inhibit the potential of the digital world’s most powerful outreach approach.
The Stats Behind This Unique Claim
Before we delve into how to overcome the threat of homogenized email marketing content, it’s a good idea to spend a few moments going over the facts and stats that support this bold claim. Doing so starts with a look at the report released by Marketing Land’s Barry Levine.In his breakdown of GetResponse’s review of the current state of the industry, which covers 1,831 unique responders and over 700 million emails, Levine notes that an astounding 42 percent of all marketers and brands send everyone on their contact list the exact same marketed message. Even more concerning is the realization that only four percent of respondents actively leverage the power of behavioral and survey data to enhance and optimize these offerings.To put all of this in far simpler terms, homogenization and the inability to appropriately personalize email marketing content is running rampant among email marketers and brands alike. This, in turn, leads to wasted potential and a considerable amount of return on investment (ROI) being left on the table for these inbox operations – two woes that no campaign manager wants to face down.
Why Do Brands Fall into This Trap?
So why are so many players in the world of email marketing coming up short on these fronts? Levine explains that a lot of the blame falls on the dual nature of email automation. Essentially, automating the process saves brands like your own a boatload of time (a decidedly good thing), but it can also serve as the perfect conduit for laziness or a lack of experience to take hold.Outside of “taking the easy way out” via a lax approach to automation, there’s also the fact that email optimization and personalization take time and effort to truly implement within the content development and deployment process. In other words, if you’re not up to date on the latest best practices in these fields, then it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or swamped as you try to work your way toward unique and engaging email content.
Ensuring That Your Email Marketing Operations Don’t Succumb to the Trend of Homogeny
Fortunately, if you have the right set of tips and tactics on your side, then you can escape the threat of homogeny, all while avoiding the headaches and growing pains listed above. To start this process off the right way, Marketing Sherpa’s Courtney Eckerle and Daniel Burnstein suggest tweaking your sends with a few personal touches.Instead of blasting out generic messages en masse, add the target recipient’s name to the subject line and try to sign-off this content with a sincere word of thanks. A branded picture or photo of the sending party at the end of the message can also be a nice touch if you’re looking to add an even deeper level of engagement to your email content.Sending out birthday best wishes, anniversary congratulations, and other messages that mimic something you would shoot over to a friend or family member keeps the personalization and interaction good vibes flowing in the inbox. If your brand prefers to maintain a more formal standing via its email marketing operations, adding in mentions of unique customer pain points or prior concerns that show up on feedback forms and surveys accomplishes similar goals in terms of creating a personalized message.Of course, enacting any of these strategies requires having access to relevant and up-to-date audience data. Without this information leading the way, personalization and crafting unique email content becomes a virtually impossible endeavor. However, if your brand is able to commit to harvesting customer info at is various sign-up points, as well as via consumer surveys and social media datamining, then enacting these strategies and breaking serve in regard to homogenization becomes a much more manageable – and rewarding – affair.
