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What message is your email marketing really sending to customers?
Nearly 65% of businesses now use email marketing as a primary tool for reaching their customers, according to a recent Campaign Monitor survey. And the list of reasons why more than two-thirds of companies employ it is not short. Email marketing helps businesses regularly connect with customers in real-time; it’s easily measurable, cost-effective, and delivers targeted messages in ways other marketing tools cannot.
While those capabilities are desirable and likely even essential, the greatest opportunity email marketing presents is its potential for building customer trust. Sales and audience engagement hinge on brand reputation and customer loyalty, which heavily depend on trust. Email marketing and its regular connection to customers can be an influential channel for building it.
Here are eight tactics to add to your email marketing approach as you build customer trust.
Before you do anything else, get customer consent.
No one trusts an inbox intruder. Individuals generally don’t appreciate marketing emails they did not agree to. Failing to gain this permission is a quick way to dent your reputation with a potential customer and wind up in a spam filter.
Ask for and be certain that you receive consent from every contact on your distribution list to confirm its recipients genuinely want to know more about your business and that you aren’t imposing your marketing on anyone. Along with being a common courtesy, some email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp have also gone so far as to bake asking for permission into their terms of use.
Be deliberate with your customer’s data.
Speaking of customer permission, you may garner higher email marketing opt-in rates if you also promote a clear privacy policy.
Customers increasingly want to know more about how their information is used by organizations requesting it. Greater than 80% of respondents to a Pew Research Center survey said they felt the risks of a company collecting their data outweighed the benefits. Earning email marketing opt-ins could depend on how transparently you can guarantee customers’ information will not be shared.
Effective privacy policies are simple, easily found, up to date, and customized – no copying and pasting. If you need help crafting a privacy policy for your business, this primer can get you started.
Start with a warm open and then keep things personal.
Whether it’s a conversation, a presentation, or a marketing email, messages tend to mean more if the individuals who receive them feel like what’s being shared is intentional to their interests. No one enjoys thinking they’re just another face in a crowd, right?
Use the customer data you’ve been permitted to collect from your recipients to personalize your emails better. Address customers by their name at the top of the message and segment where you can, including by location, specified interests, or according to recent purchases. Individualized, tailored communication is an invitation to feelings of trust.
Set immediate, realistic expectations.
Get off on the right foot by quickly outlining to your customers what an email marketing-based relationship entails. A few ideas include:
- Let your newest recipients know how often they can expect to hear from you.
- Provide an overview of the types of content you’ll regularly be sending.
- Share tips for getting the most out of their new correspondences with your business.
- Maybe even package everything in a welcome email, sent within the first couple of days of opting in.
And if they aren’t on board with those expectations, try to offer options to either scale back, customize or easily opt out of the emails they receive from your business.
Give (way) more than you get.
If a friend kept asking you for something over and over and over (and over) again without really giving you much in return, the value of that relationship would come into question, wouldn’t it?
The same is true for your email marketing recipients. They opted in because of everything they felt they would get, not because of the things they’d have to give. Your company is counted on to deliver those goods.
So keep the valuable content coming. Rather than hammering the same sale over and over again, load your emails with free access to blogs, insights, tips, demonstrations, and promotional offers – all the items that fill up your content marketing strategy. Because if you do, recipients may feel more inclined to go forward with any eventual actions you do ask them to take further down the road.
Show off your trust credentials.
Recipients of your email marketing may find it easier to trust your business if your emails showcase your qualifications for earning their trust.
For example, BBB Accredited Businesses may consider incorporating the BBB Seal into their emails. The BBB Seal is an easily recognizable sign of a business’s commitment to operating honestly and ethically. Having it as a featured visual has a way of quickly setting a tone of trust.
If your business is not BBB Accredited, promoting the mission statement or values that drive your organization works as well.
Don’t deceive the recipient.
Your efforts to grab attention may come at the cost of your recipients’ trust. Sensational subject lines or headlines (“URGENT: Your account has an issue”), for example, often produce immediate gains, like higher open rates and increased engagement, but the long-term impacts can include permanent damage to your brand.
One of the biggest “don’ts” of email marketing is implying something that ultimately never gets delivered. Tricking the recipient is not in line with telling the truth.
Have a conversation with your recipients.
You don’t talk like a robot in real life, do you? If not, it’s likely because speaking that way sounds weird, distant, and unrelatable. And you know what? It reads that way, too. So try not to present yourself like you’re Artificial Intelligence.
Instead, get real. Make the language conversational and breezy, like you’re sharing something special with an eager listener. Maybe even divulge some personal details, like an anecdote. Trust requires a relationship, which isn’t formed if one party is inauthentic.
For more information
Want to learn more about using email marketing to grow your business? Check out these dos and don'ts of email marketing and tips for using email automation to drive customer loyalty.
For more information to help your small business, check out the BBB business news feed and the BizHQ.
BBB Great West + Pacific contributed to this article.