by Scott Stephens, VP, Interactive
If you're like most web users, you currently have multiple email accounts that serve different purposes.
(1) There's the work email account - strictly business, expect for the occasional thread from a friend who still hasn't bothered to put your personal account into his/her address book.
(2) There's the "professional" personal account - most likely a Gmail account that uses your full name and is reserved for your LinkedIn profile, your professional blog and/or Twitter account, non-current-work related networking opportunities (i.e. job seeking), etc.
(3) There's the "original" personal account - that Hotmail, Yahoo, or AOL account that you've had for 10 years and can't bear to get rid of since you have no idea how many old web accounts are tied to it, and you're afraid you'll lose access to something if you get rid of it.
Then there could also be (4) the anonymous account you use when you're filling out registration forms on websites that you never want to hear from again, (5) the Tiger Woods / Ashley Madison account that you use for "discrete encounters", or (6) the porn account (sometimes lumped in with #5).
Most of us have the first 3 accounts on the list above, which quickly adds up to receiving several hundred new emails on a daily basis. This obviously presents an enormous challenge for marketers. How do you get your message to rise to the top amongst all of that noise, so that the recipient opens, reads, and interacts with it? Which brings me back to the title of this post.
Over lunch today I was doing the scan-and-scroll across 50+ new messages stacked up in my "original" personal account, and I saw an email from www.snooth.com (a great wine reviews site BTW, if you're interested) with a subject line that said "Five Wines to Drink Before Noon".
It's a grey, dreary Tuesday here in Boston, so the thought of drinking wine in the morning was eye-catching (shhhh...don't tell my boss). I opened the email, read it, clicked through to a couple of reviews, scanned their Facebook page, and subscribed to the Twitter feed - in short, everything they wanted me to do.
This struck me as a great example of a marketer using eye-catching headlines and copywriting to capture user's eyeballs. They also do a great job of pushing their content out via multiple channels - email, Facebook, Twitter, etc - using consistently well conceived content that engages their target audience and starts a conversation.
The message - as always - is that content is king. Without a great headline I would have skipped to the next email on the list. The secondary message is to also make sure you have an overall strategy for delivering content to your audience consistently across multiple channels. Today, I engaged with Snooth.com from an email. Tomorrow it will be via an update coming across my TweetDeck, or a Facebook update.
They've now elevated themselves much higher in my content consumption sphere, shifting from an occasional glance across the "original" personal account, to the top-of-mind space where I choose to interact with content on a daily basis. And as long as the copywriting coming across those channels is equaling compelling, I'll continue to engage with Snooth. But if it falls off, they'll quickly move back into my scan-and-scroll, no matter what the medium.
What do you think - are content and delivery channel equally important, or does one outweigh the other? And is drinking wine in the morning (on weekends) advisable?
Cheers!
