Managing expectations

So many great marketers fall down on their email marketing by not managing their recipient’s expectations correctly from the moment they hand over their details.

It’s vital that a recipient feels that they’re experiencing a seamless brand process from the web sign up to the welcome email as this will form the basis of their belief in you from now on.

I mean – you wouldn’t employ someone who didn’t match up to their CV and you wouldn’t date someone who claimed that they were god’s gift yet were actually pretty useless and unreliable.

Not just a welcome message

Your welcome programme is not just a welcome message – it’s the first impressions that a potential buyer will have of how you deal with your communications and in turn, them. It’s a reflection of your brand and everything it stands for – you meet your other halves parent’s for the first time and you don’t wear joggers and smell like the great unwashed. Your welcome programme shouldn’t either.
What does a welcome programme involve?

The details of the actual programme will differ depending on your industry and what you’re trying to achieve with your marketing efforts but the objective of a welcome programme is the same. Make the person feel loved and like you really care (because you should actually really care), not that you’re just trying to capture their details and once you have, you don’t really care as long as your sales team can contact them.

Try and stick to these simple welcome rules:

• Make it immediate – your ESP (email service provider) should be able to provide you with email marketing software that means you can automate sending an email based on a website action so you’ll never be late!

• Make it relevant and useful – people will always hold on to emails with useful information on them whether they’re login or key contact details, membership or account numbers or even just providing some advice to them that they can refer back to

• Don’t just send one email – take the opportunity to build a relationship with this person by asking them questions, requesting further information so that you can send them information and offers that interest them. This can be spread over more than one email.

• Don’t go for the hard sell too early – look at your customer purchasing pattern and only introduce selling to them when you know they are ready to buy or you may scare them off.

These are just the basics but they show how easy it is to implement and to be honest even if you just send a single email upon registration that reflects your brand and helps them out – it’ll go miles towards securing them as a long term, loyal customer.