Feel-Good Marketing
Thursday, July 17, 2014
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Posted by: Nathan Swartzendruber
I went to an email marketing class several years ago, put on by
Constant Contact (an email marketing company). SWON had changed much of
its staff and was offering new programs, and we knew we needed help
telling people about these changes.
What I learned is that there’s really no way to make
people pay attention to your emails. People quickly scan their
email, typically, rather than reading it in depth.
To get people to read your emails, reward them for reading.
Give them something, in the email, that makes opening it worthwhile.
Teach them something, give them a tip, or point them to a resource. This
gift should fit the audience of the email and should definitely not be a
nicely worded sales pitch. Concentrate on how you want to help them,
and then leave some room to ask people to take action. This is
called content marketing.
Writing content marketing emails can feel strange because they
contain a lot less marketing than other methods. And the job of coming
up with ideas and resources to give away is pretty different from
writing a quick pitch for an upcoming event. But the response we’ve
gotten to our emails has been positive, people still learn about our
programs through the emails, and it
feels good to set out to help people each week, too.
You can learn more about content marketing from MailChimp, which has posted a variety of guides about
email marketing (no doubt as part of their own content marketing
strategy).
- Nathan Swartzendruber, SWON Technology Educator
Level-Up Lab:
Content Marketing for Libraries
Here’s the tie-in. On July 22nd, Nathan will be leading a Level-Up
Lab on Content Marketing. We’ll be using MailChimp’s materials as a
starting point to talk about marketing audiences and content. Then we’ll
put the content marketing idea into practice. We’ll take your programs
or program ideas and brainstorm for related content. Register
today!
Can’t make it to the July 22nd Lab? Invite Nathan out to your
library; he’d be glad to help answer your specific questions.
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