How many emails do you get every day? The Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, reports that a typical person will see 105 messages hit their inbox on a daily basis. They say 75% of these emails are personally relevant, while 25% are marketing messages and spam.

Look at your own email. Do those numbers seem right to you? Personally, I’m thrilled to finally be above average in something – this morning alone there are already more than 300 new emails waiting for my attention. And far more than 25% of them are marketing messages.

I will delete the vast majority of those marketing messages without ever reading them. Chances are that you do the same thing yourself. Yet we all want people to read the marketing emails that we send. How do we make this happen?

Begin With Your Analytics

If you’ve been conducting any sort of email marketing campaign, you should have analytic reports that tell you how many emails were delivered, opened, read, and acted upon by the reader. Pay special attention to the emails that had the highest open rate. There’s something about these messages that resonate with your audience. Delve into them and see what makes them tick. Did these emails have a compelling subject line? Were they eye-catching? Did you have a great price incentive? Were you sharing unique information your customers likely didn’t know?

At this point, I’d like to take a moment to give K&J Magnetics a shout-out. K&J Magnetics is a retailer of rare Earth magnets – not exactly the type of item people line up to buy; unless you’re a certain kind of nerd, you’re not going to find their products inherently fascinating.
But their recent email blast taught people how to use magnets to detect the presence of iron in their favorite breakfast cereal. That’s not why most people who buy magnets buy magnets – but I assure you, everyone who does buy magnets is likely to find this particular application kind of cool. It’s quirky, off-beat, and attention grabbing.

Emails that deliver the eccentric and funny are emails that are read – and more importantly for marketing purposes, they’re emails that are shared. For instance, I shared the K&J Magnetics email with many of my friends who home school their children, thinking the cereal/magnet lesson is one they’d appreciate. This type of phenomenon extends the reach of your marketing, and who knows? It might even sell a few magnets.

How to Find the Quirky, Off-Beat and Attention Grabbing About Your Business

I won’t lie to you. Finding the quirky, off-beat angle of your operation can be really tough. Many times we are too close to our own operations to see them as humorous at all. One effective strategy to counter this block is to reach out to your employees, friends, and customers for ideas. You can run caption contests on social media using images of your business, products or services: these can later be repurposed into very effective email marketing pieces.

If your email marketing isn’t working the way you’d like it to, or you’d like to fine tune your campaign to extend the appeal and reach of each message you send, give us a call! We’re here to help.