Right Now Value

If you’re a relationship marketing junkie like me, you’re already familiar with Seth Godin’s early tenets of email communications. Namely, that the content of every email blast you send should be Relevant, Personal and Anticipated. In very brief summary: have something to do with an interest of the recipient, recognize them by name and contain content the recipient would look forward to receiving.

Fast forward a couple of years and you know email is no longer a novelty, and has become a necessary and at times annoyingly plentiful part of life. If you’re a marketer, how do you make your messages stand out? According to a recent article in Media Post’s Media Daily News: keep it short, keep the graphics “clean”, watch your frequency. Again, briefly, just because you can stuff a message full of content doesn’t mean you should; just because you can put dancing images and flash in the graphics doesn’t mean you should and, just because you can hit the send button on an hourly basis, doesn’t mean you should. In fact in each of these instances, you most definitely shouldn’t. People just don’t have the attention span or literal bandwidth to deal with your messages. Short and sweet is the rule.

The article makes another point I found especially intriguing: the concept of “right now value”, information that has an immediate benefit to the reader. To quote the article, and Nielsen media, “....with consumers getting a better grip on the spam problem..., they have started to differentiate between ‘need to know’ messages and ‘nice to know’ ones... newsletters viewed as essential by recipients are thriving. The ones that make users think ‘right now, I’m getting value out of this’ have created a connection too strong to be broken by email overload.”

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