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Email marketing should be about selling more than products, said Sue Coakley, Yahoo!’s Sr. Director Customer Contact Strategy, at MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Email Summit. If it comes down to the product only, customers can definitely get it for cheaper at other places, she added.
Email marketing is about the long-term relationship you develop with recipients. This is why Yahoo! strives to provide its subscribes with an experience. It pulls them in emotionally and tries to become their go-to resource for a variety of topics. In this blog post we discuss how Yahoo! achieves this goal by focusing on particular types of emails.
Holiday-Themed Emails
Cori Chao, Yahoo!’s Director of Email Marketing, explained that one of Yahoo!’s strategies is to package content around seasonal themes and events. First, the company identifies a target audience based on demographic and behavioral data. Then, it creates holiday-themed emails around the content relevant to this group of recipients.
Both the images and articles used in the email support the selected theme and are aligned with the interests of the specific audience segment. “Celebrate Yourself,” for instance, Yahoo!’s email campaign tied to the New Year, was targeted to women in their 30s. Hence, it included articles about wellness, food and yoga.
Emails with the Content Picks of Similar Users
Another type of email communication Yahoo! engages in is spreading the favorite content of other similar users. It evaluates what types of highly-rated content will resonate with people who haven’t seen it. In this way, the company takes advantage of the human impulse to explore what others have found valuable. Yahoo! packages these emails in a sort of “Did You See It” campaigns, which are easy to produce and make the most of well-performing content.
Topic-Based Emails
Yahoo! also lets its recipients subscribe to topics they are passionate about. One can request to receive on-going emails about favorite topics, such as cooking, travel or health. In that way, Yahoo! doesn’t assume any unknown information about its audience but ensures its email communication is highly targeted to the individual.
While Yahoo!’s specific email themes might not be easily applied to your business, its approach to email marketing is. As Sue noted, it is all about the three Rs—build on the relationship, keep it relevant and respect people’s preferences.
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