Is It Valuable or Just Email Inbox Filler?

According to numerous experts, including Entrepreneur.com, email marketing is still an effective means of promoting your business and generating sales. This seems to be true despite anecdotal evidence suggesting that most people receive more than 100 email messages a day. Before you click that Send button, consider your own email habits.

Your email inbox is like your family. You think everyone treats it the same… until you learn otherwise. Some people keep their inboxes sparkling clean by dealing with each piece of email as it comes in, whether it’s important or just email inbox filler. These people are probably OCD. Other people fail so miserably that it feels like a victory whenever they get their inbox down to fewer than 20 waiting emails.

Things That Clog Up Your Inbox

Your email inbox isn’t just where SPAM goes to die; it’s also where all your notifications, newsletters and sales pitches end up. It’s strange that someone you don’t know would send you an email to sell you something you don’t want or need, but that’s just one type of email inbox filler. And they’re the emails that are easy to delete. Click… and gone.

But the notifications and newsletters — ostensibly things you’ve voluntarily signed up for — are a different matter. You want to read them, but you can’t find the time. So they just sit there: email inbox filler that takes up space and makes you feel guilty about not participating in the modern world. Eventually, they last long enough to lose their relevancy or you get tired of opening and closing them, like you sometimes do with the refrigerator door when you’re vaguely hungry. Then, click, and it’s gone.

Don’t Send Email Inbox Filler

Whenever you send email, whether it’s to one person or 100 people, bear in mind that your recipients don’t receive your message in a vacuum. It becomes part of the deluge to their email inbox every day. No matter how much time and effort you spent crafting your message, it might end up in the Trash.

To overcome that tendency, you can’t use email to sell your products or services to unaware recipients. If you try: click, and it’s gone. Instead, offer something of value:

• A free ebook that suits their interests
• Free entertainment, such as a link to a movie
• Free insight into your business that they can put to use immediately
• Free ways to save money on something they want
• A free lunch — although everyone will tell you there’s no such thing

Consider Your Audience… First and Foremost

It’s easy to compose an email to sell your products or services. After all, you know the benefits better than anyone. But unless you can give a valid reason and a sense of urgency, no one will even open your email. Unless you can show clear benefits, no one will follow the link to your website. Unless your recipients are in the frame of mind to buy — and buy now — you won’t make a single sale.

Ray Access sends out a newsletter once a month. You can sign up on our website. We try our best to provide value to all our friends, colleagues and customers. If we give you something you can use, our newsletter has done its job. We don’t expect you to race to our website to hire us. But we do hope that when you’re in the market for writing services, you’ll remember us. That’s the only job of a newsletter.

And that’s worth the risk of sending something you may consider email inbox filler, even just once in a while. We strive to improve with every single issue — to give you something of value. And that includes advice like this.

Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.