Email marketing is a necessary component of a marketing strategy, but some customers may view it as a necessary evil instead. Tools such as the ones provided by Vocus can insure that your campaigns are a success. The success of sharing news, products and opportunities with customers can be eclipsed by email burnout or customer resentment of unnecessary emails.

Try these five tips to ensure that your marketing emails reach their recipients and don’t cause resentment.

1. Use technology to build a gap between your company and the customers – From an online purchase to a social share, every action your customers take can be aggregated and analyzed. Customer intelligence can help you learn about your customers to ultimately personalize your emails. By sending messages that match your customers’ needs and expectations, you’ll improve your ROI.

2. Get to know the customer – Email marketing subscribers are individuals. Try to see them that way. By connecting with the customer on a one-to-one basis, you can communicate in a more relevant way. At minimum, use the recipient’s first name in the email message to convey a deeper sense of connection.

3. Incentivize the customer – Learning more information about your customers can improve connection and marketing efforts. However, the first step — getting customers to share data — can be the most challenging. Use  incentives  to reward customers for sharing data.

Consider rewarding customers with a money-off coupon for completing a survey or entering respondents into a giveaway. Once you collect the data, it’s up to you to put it to good use.

4. Headline and email subject matter – A boring headline can prompt an automatic delete from a busy customer who is already overwhelmed with email. Instead of calling your monthly newsletter “[Company] Monthly Newsletter,” craft a  dynamic title  that customers will want to open because they are intrigued.

Stay away from words that will trigger a user’s own internal spam filter or an email spam filter. Also, avoid using all-caps in your headline or using words like free, sale, giveaway or amazing.

5.  Customize your offers – Remember to use all of the data you’re gathering from your customer intelligence apps. A customer’s previous purchase behavior can be used to create a targeted campaign or an email discount offer.

Targeting a customer who was browsing your shoe collection with a BOGO coupon could tempt her into making that purchase she was only wishful thinking about before your discount offer.

As you adopt these steps, remain responsive to feedback and customer intelligence data. If you discover that a carefully crafted message didn’t meet its mark, brainstorm what went wrong and consider an  email marketing campaign.

You’ll also need to determine what the best messaging schedule is for your customers. Is one message per week enough to ensure you have top of mind awareness or does it lead to an uptick in unsubscribe requests?

The only way to know how often customers want to hear from you — and what they want to hear — is to try out different schedules and tactics and see what works best. By being open to change and actively analyzing email marketing results, you can stay off the list of customer fatigue and prevent email burnout that can tarnish your reputation.

About The Guest Author: Dawn Altnam works in the Midwest, and she enjoys following the business tech world. After furthering her education, she has spent some time pursuing her interests and occasionally blogs about Deluxe.

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