I’m not going to lie… this was not an easy subject to tackle.
I did a little more digging and discovered something else. There are loads of stories out there about unscrupulous practices revolving around cryptocurrencies. It’s a market that is developing enough of a stigma to validate concern and, in the cases of companies like MailChimp, start barring the gates to protect their own bottom lines and reputations.
Now, some content creation services would look at this and say, “You know what? Whatever. These people are responsible for their own reputations, so we’ll just go ahead and create content for them however they want.” At Beez, I’d like to think that we have slightly higher standards than that.
Yes, we want to work with you if you deal in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, but we also want to be sure that you make the money you’re coming to us to help you make. What we do not want is to be part of the problem or make it seem like we’re somehow all right with less-than-honest approaches to marketing.
A huge part of success in marketing is building and establishing trust. You cannot do that if large segments of your audience decide that you aren’t trustworthy. With that in mind, I would like to address some of the common issues that cryptocurrency marketing professionals experience with email marketing and give some advice about what you can do to protect your own reputation in this niche.
The Believability Angle
Cryptocurrency marketing has suffered from a fast influx of both niche currencies and predatory marketers. The language of your emails, from your subject line forward, must have a higher-than-average level of believability. Without that, you won’t get enough opens to make your effort worthwhile.
While I’m certain that not all the details of MailChimp’s decision were present in that article (or in the several others I went digging to find after), I have to imagine that open rates had something to do with it. Not enough readers took those messages seriously enough to give them the time of day, amounting to little more than wasted bandwidth and other resources on their network.
Facilitating Opens and Conversions
So, what would make a reader take your message seriously enough to click on it? Truthfully, it boils down to the same things that make any email marketing campaign successful. These three elements always need to be present:
#1: A powerful subject line – Subjects that are direct and to the point are the most successful. Subject lines should not be longer than ten words; five is even better.
#2: Identifying one or more key pain point(s) – Giving the reader a good reason to open your message and following through with valuable information shows consistency in your message and goes a long way toward building trust. Making the promise of a solution to the problem at hand is also mandatory, even if you don’t deliver it in one message.
#3: A definitive call to action – Always give the reader something to do with the information presented and be very specific.
Deterring Opens and Conversions
Now, let’s look at the other side of this equation: What sorts of things repel readers or even cause them to report your content to the platforms that send it? Remember, people will see that MailChimp logo before anything of yours in most cases, especially if your emails aren’t heavily branded (and most aren’t). They will subsequently take out their frustrations on the wrong entity if you annoy them with obviously errant, misstated, or overstated concepts.
Avoid using spammy words like amazing, free, awesome, unlimited, unmatched, and incredible, particularly in subject lines. These words are red flags for both users and spambots and will result in more eyerolls than opens. Saving them for the body of the message won’t help you, either.
One of the key issues with services like MailChimp is that any bad marketing practices reflect on them. If too many messages from the company’s IP range keep getting flagged as spam, that can create issues for other reputable marketers and, subsequently, cause the autoresponder platform to suffer losses in both revenue and service interruptions for reputable clients.
Superlatives and hyperbolic language are also killers in any marketing email message, especially in the subject line. In short, strive for an approach that communicates genuine, forthright messages. Overhyping and overstating key concepts will not fool anyone or motivate them to want to work with you, especially when it comes to ventures that carry a degree of risk.
“But These People Are Subscribers…”
A huge trap that many email marketers fall into is the idea that if they captured an email address based on the content of a landing page, it’s somehow all right to be more casual or overenthusiastic than it would be on a cold contact.
Most subscribers don’t unsubscribe from lists right away. They could get hundreds of emails from you by the time they get around to clicking that marginally macroscopic link that gets them off your list. In the meantime, they simply delete your messages when they see them or, worse, start marking your messages as spam.
Surviving the Email Game in Cryptocurrency
The bottom line here is simple: If people subscribe to your list, they also subscribe, at least conceptually, to your vision. If you start blurring that vision with questionable content, it will not work out in your favor.
Cryptocurrency is a touchy market that has had its fair share of scandal. Yes, it is a relevant way to make money, but there is a lot of black hat marketing surrounding it, too. The question here is whether you want to make a long-term lucrative venture out of it or if your goal is to simply take the money and run. If it’s the latter, believe me, the people and entities that matter are already onto you.
Always opt for the white hat approach. Be genuine, do what you can to build trust through your messaging, and maintain high levels of integrity – especially with email. Those who do are going to clean up in the crypto markets. Those who don’t will find themselves as little more than a lot of people’s unpleasant memories before very long.
