Mary’s recent post doting on Simon and a Benchmark Email post about the five email tips from pre-school both inspired me to take an opportunity to dote on my own daughter who is now five.

My wife and I have been proud to watch my daughter grow into a bright, charming, and polite five year old. Having recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from France, she’s very proud of her perfectly accented English words and loves to show them off to her two younger brothers.

Some of the ideas we try to teach her apply as well to email ads as they do to everyday life, so I gathered up a list of the things my five-year-old daughter could teach about email ads.

Be helpful and respectful.

In a kindergarten classroom, kids help each other by sharing supplies and words of encouragement. That helpfulness tends to help win new friends. When running email ads, you can build a more successful strategy by treating subscribers like friends (or potential friends) and helping to fulfill their need: relevant, timely information that can benefit them. In other words, you find more success by being helpful.

List owners: Make sure that you properly target email ads and that you work with companies that have something to offer your subscribers. You must also respect the explicit and implied preferences of subscribers by quickly processing unsubs and sending fewer email ads (or none!) to people who aren’t interacting with them.

Advertisers: Only reach out to the people interested in what you offer and offer them something in return, whether that’s a discount on a first order or a calculator to assess how much money they might save switching to your service.

Be truthful.

Just as it is for any parent, honesty is one of the things I focus on instilling in my children. At ividence, it’s also one of the things we are most proud to represent to our clients.

List owners: It can be difficult to imagine why you would want to tell your subscribers that you are monetizing your email list. However, being less than upfront with your email subscribers can damage your reputation with them, and it will definitely decrease the effectiveness of your email ad campaigns.

Advertisers: You might wish for your brand to be the only one visible. But just as you wouldn’t buy a print ad from a magazine that wouldn’t put their name on the cover, you should never run email ads that don’t make it clear why the subscriber is getting this email message.

Be creative.

Just as no kindergarten classroom would be complete without art supplies, no email ad campaign is complete without a touch of creativity to spark the interest of subscribers.

List owners: You should always know (and approve) ads that are sent to your email list. Those ads should be interesting, polished, and targeted, just as your own email newsletters are.

Advertisers: Just as with campaigns to your own opt-in list, you should try for creative visual, intriguing (and honest!) subject lines, and strong calls to action. If you are lacking in inspiration, check out our Creative Email Design board on Pinterest or sites like Email Design Review, Retail Email Blog and Email Critic to see what other email marketers are doing.

These three simple tips can make a world of difference if you incorporate them into your email advertising strategy. What wisdom do you have from the kindergarten set that applies to email marketing and email ads?

Related articles
3 Cool Things That Happen When You Send Email Ads to Your List
Can Email Work as a Customer Acquisition Channel?
A Checklist for Monetizing Your Email List the Right Way

Images courtesy of Hannes.A.Schwetz and Icemoon.

Eric Didier
CEO & Co-Founder
Eric Didier is a successful serial entrepreneur with a broad background in enterprise software sales management, complex software development and product management for web technologies. He was the founder and CEO of Soamai in 2000, a metadata applications company which was acquired by Allen Systems Group in April 2004. He can be reached at ed@ividence.com.