In this episode of the podcast, I share 5 easy tips to improve your email marketing.
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Got questions about whether your marketing is aligned? Email me at jennifer@jennifer-roland.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the Credit Union Social Strategy Podcast. I’m your host and your Credit Union copywriter, Jennifer Roland Cadiente. And today, I want to talk about email marketing.
Does it even work anymore? When we first started to do email marketing, it happened because our budgets were getting smaller and we wanted to just translate our printed member newsletter into email because then we wouldn’t have to pay the printing and mailing costs anymore. So a lot of credit unions are still just sending that monthly newsletter with all the promotions, maybe a link to the statement, or that might be separate. And it’s maybe not working as well as you wanted it to.
Maybe your open rates are dropping, maybe your click-through rates were never great and now they’re absolutely abysmal. So what can you do to make email marketing work again? And I’ve got a few tips that I can share with you. One of them is going to be your most important and it’s going to be to send more often.
Obviously, we don’t want to send every day, like that’s a lot from your credit union. But that once a month thing, people forget about it or they’re like, oh, I know what this is going to be and it’s long and I can’t get to it right now. And then by the next day, it’s completely buried in their inbox.
You know, unless you probably have a few of those inbox zero members, but most of us, we just have thousands of unread messages because if we don’t open it right then, we just forget about it. It doesn’t exist anymore. And you quit even seeing that number when you log into your email.
So I recommend that you send once a week and keep it to one, maybe two stories or promotions per email. You know, you might have a blog post on a new scam that’s coming out. So give a quick synopsis in the email, link to your blog post about it.
Then you can put, you know, an ad for whatever your big promotion is that you want to talk about this week and have a call to action there. But you know, the days of doing just like the, you know, we’ve got 18 different promotions with 18 different things people can click on. Those are just over on email.
I know I always felt that we were saying the same thing too many times. You know, we, you know, we couldn’t just keep talking about our home equity promotion because people get sick of hearing about it. But the thing is, even, you know, back in, back in the day, advertising, people always said people had to see a message seven times before they even remembered it because we are bombarded with so much information.
Now, people think that’s up to 28 times. So you may, if you say it 28 times, they may only notice it once. So to you, it feels like absolute overkill, but everyone else is just like, Oh, hey, that’s a cool thing.
I’m going to find out more about that. No one ever thinks, Oh my God, I wish my credit union would just stop talking about home equity loans because they don’t notice how many times we talk about home equity loans. Another thing that I think is really helpful is to do different messaging for members and non members.
One of the interesting studies that’s come out this year is saying that Gen Z is not, not that they’re not conscious of the, of the rates, and they’re not going to be looking for the best rate, but the more important thing is trust. So if you have built trust with your Gen Z potential members over the years, you’re probably going to be the first one that they look at. And if you also have great rates, then they’ll be like, okay, this is where I’m going to go for my credit card or my auto loan or my mortgage, whatever they happen to be looking for at the time.
So one of the ways that you can do that, of course, is having separate, separate lists. That is probably the cleanest, the most compliant with, you know, keeping your, keeping your member list safe. You can also, if you use an email marketing program that has, you know, just one big list with tagging, you can use tagging to personalize the messages.
So you only send, you know, member focused things to people that are tagged as current member. You only send non-member information to people that are not tagged as member. You can all, of course, you know, personalize much more granular than that.
But at this point, you know, we’re just talking about separating our members from our non-members so that our members feel, you know, like they’re getting the information that that only they need is only for them, but also that we’re continuing to build a relationship and build trust with our members that will make things much more effective over time and help you, you know, bring in more of our younger, younger potential members. Then this one is also huge. Make your calls to action more visible and easy.
I know that, you know, you look at your email and you think, oh, it’s so busy if I have all these links and buttons and they all go to the same thing, but people are viewing them differently. You know, if you’re viewing it on the desktop, maybe it does look a little busy. If you’re viewing it on your phone, you’re probably only seeing one link or one button at a time.
And that’s going to be just really easy. Click the button, go to the thing, find out more information. Another thing is to not just, you know, have click here to learn more, make it really active.
So apply for a loan. Check our rates, not click here to check our rates or click here to apply for a loan. And that also helps you, you know, cut out some unnecessary words.
People know by now that when there’s under underlining color or a button, click here is implied. So we don’t need to say it. And finally, just reduce the friction.
That kind of ties in with making your calls to action more visible and easy because they don’t have the friction of being like, is this one? Is this one I really see? I’m clicking to do the thing. But also make sure that when they go there, they get exactly what they need. If you’re still doing a long promotions page, use anchor links inside of it.
So if it’s about the loan, it’s the third thing on the list. Use an anchor link so that when they click in the email, they go straight to that part of the page rather than to the top of the page. And they’re like, well, this doesn’t even go to what I wanted to see anyway.
And then they’ll just go away. That’s the other thing with our, you know, our short attention spans. If something isn’t exactly what we think it’s going to be, we just go away.
You find that on your loan applications. Like if it’s too much of a hassle to get up and go find the information in the other room when you’re filling it out on your phone, on the couch, during a commercial, if you’ve been watched commercials anymore, then they’re just going to not fill out the loan. They’re going to go somewhere else that isn’t making them get up and go find some documents that they don’t keep handy.
So just think about the ways that we can reduce friction, just even in our email marketing, because that also helps build trust over time that we’re not trying to be confusing. We’re there for them. We’re making everything easy.
And sometimes easy on the consumer side is more work on our side. And we just have to be okay with that. It’s the cost of doing business these days.
And it’s the cost of running a successful email marketing program. Make it as easy as possible for the people that you want to clip and take action based on the words that you’re sending them. So I hope that was helpful.
Again, my tips are to:
And if you’re not sure if your email marketing is working or if you want some help, I do have an email marketing audit. I have the link in the comments or the show notes, depending on whether you’re watching this on YouTube or listening to it on your podcast app.
And you can also always go to credit union copywriter.com and get all the info. So I’ll talk to you next time. And until then, happy marketing.
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