Making Emails More Useful: Content Marketing

Making Emails More Useful: Content Marketing. But you can become even more useful through content marketing. Sending helpful, informative, or entertaining information can help retain customers and increase customer lifetime value, which helps your bottom line. Improve your customer loyalty and the customer lifetime value becomes easier to calculate. So, how should you use content in your emails? Content marketing works best when it useful and relevant information, or is entertaining, even amusing. Tell me more Hotel and travel brands could do a lot better here, most emails I receive are images of places and prices. Create a constant stream of content so your subscribers look forward to receiving your emails. Only time will tell but it’s already working for those brands that do it well. The use of content marketing is on the rise so we should at least investigate what can be incorporated into our email marketing communications to keep our subscribers engaged and coming back to buy more of our products and services.

Previously I looked at making emails more useful for your subscribers in order to improve engagement through relevance and targeting. But you can become even more useful through content marketing.

Sending helpful, informative, or entertaining information can help retain customers and increase customer lifetime value, which helps your bottom line. B2B companies have been using content marketing in emails for a while, this blog is an example as a summary will end up in our email newsletter. B2C emails have some catching up to do and should look to move away from the common layout of blocks of products available to buy.

Paradoxically, despite a plethora of tracking tools and modelling algorithms, customer lifetime value is increasingly difficult to nail down. As consumers, our brand loyalty will only stretch so far as we are bombarded from every angle with deals and offers for competing brands and products.

Improve your customer loyalty and the customer lifetime value becomes easier to calculate. It’s still true that it costs more to acquire new customers than it does to sell to existing ones and using content in your emails can go a long way to building loyalty. It’s the ability to maintain reader trust while still profiting off of the product that you’re pushing to these readers.

The long and the short of it

“But emails should be clean, clear and simple with an obvious call to action” I hear you cry. This depends on what you’re trying to achieve. A sales-led email often works well using this approach but, if you think about it, whether we’re reading something that has appeal in an email, on a website, in an app or social media shouldn’t matter – it is still useful, engaging content and it makes us feel good about the brand.