It’s all too easy when you’re eating, breathing and sleeping your product / business to forget that your customers or audience probably don’t know the details as well as you!

I was reminded of this last week when I received an email from the Affordable Art Fair – a great initiative and I’m just about to book my tickets for this year!

Marketing messages: remember what your audience don't know

They sent me a very lovely email (with a discount code – even better!). It had great examples of the sort of art they’ll be exhibiting and really nice “BOOK TICKETS” buttons which were actually just visuals / graphics rather than your typical buttons (I guess some people may say these won’t stand out as much as “typical buttons” but I actually thought they worked well).

Marketing messages: remember what your audience don't know

My only issue with the email was that it didn’t actually tell me when the event was running. They most likely have emailed me this information before, but I get a lot of emails and so I’m afraid ones like this aren’t top of my priority inbox. But this one did catch my attention and I was instantly interested in booking tickets… but I needed to know first if I’m free that weekend… and I had to click through to their website before I could find this information. And anything that involves effort can mean a lot of drop outs.

It may be that the AAF didn’t want to bombard their readers with a message they’ve told them all so many times before… but it’s important to remember that with email marketing, you can’t guarantee that everyone has read everything you’ve sent them before (even with very detailed open rate tracking and mailing list filtering) – or that they’ll remember it.

So the next time you send an email, or any marketing communication – stop and think: if this is the first your audience have heard on the subject, does your communication cover enough bases and give them the essential details they need?