Ever wonder why toothpaste is always “new and improved”?
You would think that after 20 years they would have run out of room for improvement. But in the case of toothpaste, it isn’t product innovation. For the biggest part it’s marketing.
Consumers like “new”, they like to try new things, it’s hard-wired into our brains.
New is the co-pilot of interesting, it allows to rejuvenate otherwise slacking attention and can be a great email marketing strategy for keeping prolonged interest.
How to keep your email marketing Fresh
In email marketing, keeping it fresh can means both smaller and larger changes. Examples of refreshing your email marketing can be in the form of:
How often do we update our email marketing?
There is a great variation in the way email marketers update their newsletters. Some refresh it all the time, both form and content, but most don’t. My gut says that even less email marketing programs get refreshed in B2B than in B2C.
Chad White has monitored all US retail email newsletters for several years, he adds: “I’d say retailers do a major email template redesign every 3 years or so on average. Some are long overdue. Nowadays email template redesigns coincide with website relaunches, with small changes in between. In between big redesigns, you should always be exploring small changes. Small tweaks = big results”
The best case study for creating added value by refreshing, without changing the product must be Shreddies. After an intern jokingly suggested that the cerial weren’t squares, but diamond shaped during a brainstorm, they went with it. They rebranded Shreddies to Shreddies Diamonds. The communication was playful, so people were in on the joke. “Recent advances in cereal technology have allowed us to take Shreddies cereal to a whole new level of geometric superiority”. People loved it, brand value was created seemingly out of thin air, which resulted in significantly higher sales.
Consistency is valuable in email marketing
Small changes in design and content are more easily made and can have big (optimisation) impact. I am not talking about making your emails totally unrecognisable, or “risk it all” types of change. Consistency is valuable too. It’s good to have the design and content of your email flow into and complement your website. (Design) consistency allows for your recipient to easily orientate and stay in a trusted environment, that can be of true influence to conversion results.
The difference between new and improved
But new isn’t always better. If you have been actively testing and improving your emails, you will know that even seemingly small changes can have a big impact on bottom line results. Renewing your email is a good idea, but be aware and test the new designs to see if your results aren’t actually driving in reverse because of it. Changing around your emails to be fresh is a great email marketing strategy for engagement.
