Making Sure Your Email Marketing is Timely and Un-offensive
By: Kimberly Grant
Sending emails these days is no longer about “spray and pray”. No, no. There’s a lot more thought and effort that goes into that 600 pixel, carefully worded, colored layout. There are reports and analyses that must be ran on a regular basis. Entire teams are formed and tasked with generating what HubSpot Academy calls CATS.
Calling all CATS
Not the Broadway musical with the agile feline-like actors. In marketing, CATS is when you send the right content to the right audience at the time to achieve success.
In layman’s terms, it means getting your email message to the right person in the right amount of time to get them to react. There are teams of people who use the CATS model to generate that perfect email message to go out at the perfect time to achieve optimal results.
When CATS Go Wrong
Although, when there aren’t teams of people working to the same common goal, it can be a disaster. For instance, I am a woman of color who is non-Spanish-speaking. Every now and then, I get email messages from political groups written in Spanish. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this. However, I am clearly not the sender’s target audience.
The sender clearly did not segment their database before sending their email message. Segmenting is basically taking an entire database of contact information and grouping the contacts based on things like demographics.
Bringing Shame to Segmenting
As you can see, not segmenting correctly can have disastrous results. The lack of segmenting a contact list can cause:
- Sender to look unprofessional
- Recipient (me) to ignore the communication
- Wasted time and effort of the marketing team by not ensuring their messages were going to the right people
Now that I have lambasted one sender, I’d like to give high praise to another sender.
Happy CATS
Every now and then when I leave my happy place (also known as my local Starbucks) with my overly priced coffee drink in hand, something happens in my inbox. Starbucks sends me an email message asking me to rate my experience. The email message checks all of the important boxes of CATS.
The content of the Starbucks email is being delivered to the right person; me, the recent purchaser. The message was sent (most likely via a marketing automation) minutes after purchase, making it a timely message. And, the content is relevant to me, because I would be considered a Starbucks customer and an expert in their brand.
This allows Starbucks to successfully achieve two things: learning about my experience to make the product better and foster an increase of trust in the Starbucks brand.
Essential CATS
CATS are essential and not just the cute, fluffy animals seen on Youtube videos. They are what can make or break a marketer’s email campaign. While email campaigns might seem antiquated, it’s still the most effective communication tool for all marketers. That means marketers have to make sure the CATS are in play. Otherwise, it will be 9 AM and the contact will be reading an email message in a language they can’t understand.
For more media posts from Kimberly Grant, feel free to view it here.
