5 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Sending An Email
The Five Ws
Since the first email sent by Ray Tomlinson (to himself) in 1971, we can say that millions of emails have been sent… ok maybe billions. Trillions?
You are far off the mark. Do you have any idea how many emails are being sent each day?
215… BILLION. That makes more than 2.4 million emails sent per second!
Knowing that there are 2.6 billion email users worldwide, that means that the average email user receives 82 emails per day!
I know, you must be thinking something is wrong in the math, because you probably don’t receive 82 emails per day. Now think again — all those email accounts you have: your personal one (maybe you even have 3 personal accounts, among which there is that « trash-email account », for all your not-that-important subscriptions) and your professional one(s). Now think also about your spam folders. Do you have any idea how many emails you receive that are directly being moved to your spam folder by your webmail service? No, me neither but go check it out by yourself. It’s not the point of this article.
The point is
everyone gets tons of emails each day, and if your job is to send emails, you’d better make sure you:
- don’t land in the spam folder (this is the worst thing that could ever happen to you)
- don’t land in that useless email account no one cares about (for that, the only way is to make sure people actually do want to hear about you by email; show them you have something valuable to share)
- land in a frequently checked email account and that you have something interesting to say. And by interesting, I mean interesting for them, not for you! Stop with your salesy emails in which you think you give something incredible to your recipients by saying your product is the best one.
Email competition is tough, and to have a chance with your recipients you have to spend time crafting your content.
The 5 questions you should ask yourself before sending an email (a.k.a the 5 Ws)
These Five questions will help you send the right email to the right audience at the right time, and thus increase your chances to have successful email campaigns.
Who?
Who is your audience?
Determine who is your audience so that the content is relevant to them. So don’t answer to this question by saying « everyone on my list ». It is way better to send the right message to the right people. Segment your list! You can segment it in many different manners: people coming from your blog, people living in a certain area, having a certain job… The idea is to know who they are and what are their interests. Define your own segments.
What?
What do you want them to do after they receive your email?
That means you have to set a specific goal. That goal must be an action you can quantify! And « clicking on the CTA » is not a goal. Here are good examples of goals:
- subscribing to your blog
- downloading an ebook
- registering for a demo of your product
When?
When is it the appropriate time to send your email?
This is not about the time or day in the week. It’s about when in the Buyer’s Journey is it the best time. You don’t know what the Buyer’s Journey is? Go check out this article.
Try to match the content that you send with the timing of your recipients in the Buyer’s Journey. Don’t try to sell your product to someone that is in the Awareness stage, he doesn’t even know he needs your product or something similar. Send the right content at the right time!
Where?
Where is your audience going to read your email?
Is it on a desktop at the office? On their phone at home? On a tablet while watching the TV?
A little note on that: today, 53% of email opens are on mobile. Take this into account, and optimize your emails for mobile.
Why?
Why are you sending this message?
You want your email to be both beneficial for you/your company and your recipients. Let me repeat this again: for both you AND YOUR RECIPIENTS. If your recipients are leads, try to understand why they gave you their email addresses, what value they were looking for. If they are already customers, try to understand if there is anything else that seems valuable to them and that you can give them. The ultimate goal is to turn your customers into promoters/evangelists — that means gaining their trust by giving a lot of value without expecting anything in return.
The bonus question
How?
How will you know you’ve met your goal?
Don’t send an email campaign without having a clear goal in mind, and knowing how to say if your campaign was a success or not. It has to be something quantifiable. Don’t just check the clicks and opens. Check also the website traffic, the social media engagement and other metrics that could be related to your campaign…
There you go. Ask yourself those questions each time you prepare a campaign, and chances are you will have emails with the right content for the right audience at the right time. It may not be the case at your first try, but the more you do it and analyze the results, the better your campaigns will become. Of course, the first step to great emails is making sure people actually open your emails. And for that, I’ve written an article for you about How To Have World-Class Email Open Rates. Go check it out if you haven’t read it yet, you’ll get all the important info to optimize for opens in a 5 min read!
A last note: this article was highly inspired by the courses given by Hubspot to pass the Email Marketing Certification. If you want even more details, I encourage you to go check out the courses!
I will give you more tips about how to send great emails in further articles. Follow me to make sure you don’t miss anything!
And if you found this article helpful, don’t hesitate to click on the heart, I will truly appreciate it :)
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Or ask me any questions on thibaud.herr@gmail.com
