The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the entire business world into crisis mode. Marketing functions, such as email marketing, have had to be modified to keep up with the disaster. Email marketing remains an important strategy and you still have the capacity to reach a large audience – in fact you might even have a larger captive audience, with so many people sitting at home. Here are the practices you need to adopt to keep your email marketing relevant at this time.
Always acknowledge the crisis
Don’t try to pretend the crisis isn’t there and just blithely go on promoting your product. Acknowledge the situation and work it into your content as far as is possible. Data indicates that people are opening and reading more emails than they were before the crisis, particularly those that mention COVID-19.
Relook your automated emails
If you have been sending out automated emails since before the crisis began, take another look at them now and ensure that the tone and content is still appropriate. You don’t want you audience to think that you are out of touch or insensitive, simply because you failed to updated your automated mailers.
Assess the atmosphere
Watch what your competitors and marketers in unrelated fields are doing. Look up great and poor examples of email marketing and emulate where applicable.
Be sensitive and do not try and leverage fear
While you do want to acknowledge COVID-19 and demonstrate that you are working around it and are being conscious of its effects on your audience’s lives, do not stretch your mentions of the pandemic (or any crisis) to instil or leverage off the emotion of fear. It’s all too easy to do – especially in certain industries – and it must be avoided. You will find that your brand and your sales will all the better for keeping a positive tone and working to provide an antidote to fear.
Do you need help formulating a top notch email marketing strategy? Contact WSI OMS.