Which Email Marketing Strategy Should You Choose: Full Meal or Just the Aroma?

Let’s say you’re at Alfredo’s.

Alfredo’s is your favorite Italian restaurant and you’ve been yearning all week for this lasagna.

You sit down, chomp a mouthful, then another mouthful. The flavors explode in your mouth. Then Alfredo steps in and takes the plate away before you get the third bite in.

It’s enough to make you choke, right?

You were into the meal, but Alfredo says you have to get up from your table and continue your meal in the next room.

Email newsletters can make you boiling mad like that too, you know …

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You open the newsletter, you’re reading about a topic that’s of immense interest to you. You’re about 150 words into the newsletter and suddenly you can’t read any more. You have to click and go to the website to get the rest of the story.

Yup, you still get your “meal,” but it’s a bit of an inconvenience.

Or is it?

Your email marketing needs to create engagement

The purpose of an email newsletter is to create engagement, and there are two distinct ways to create this engagement.

• Method 1: Give the client the entire “meal”
• Method 2: Give the client the “aroma”

Let’s break down these two methods — what they mean, what they do, and why you may not actually have to choose just one of them to have a successful email marketing strategy.

We’ll start with Method 1: the full meal

At Psychotactics, if you’ve noticed, you get the entire article in your newsletter. This means you never have to click on anything. Once you’ve downloaded the newsletter, you can continue to read the article from start to finish.

The concept there is simple: You are sitting down to eat a meal, and yes, you should be able to enjoy it before being yanked all over the place.

However, that’s only part of the engagement.

Once you finish the meal, you’re offered “dessert.” But for dessert, you have to get up and go to the other room. In our case, the dessert may be a special free report. Or in most cases, we sell products, books, or courses.

So the form of engagement here is simple: Once the meal is done, you’re allowed to create engagement by driving the client to another site.

But of course, that’s not the only email marketing strategy for engaging the client. You can just give the client the aroma of the meal, instead.

Now on to Method 2: just the “aroma”

The precise word for this method of engagement is called the “tease.”

You create enough connection with your headline and a couple of paragraphs. You create just enough curiosity for the reader to click to your website.

Many blogs use this method of engagement because they want their readers to go to the blog, watch the video, read the article, and then comment.

So what they’re generating is a ton of engagement. And of course the best way to create this engagement is to leave the reader in a state of intense curiosity, so much so that they’re forced to click. Some blogs will use a controversy too, and that will force the engagement.

It’s all about the aroma … the aroma and nothing but the aroma. The main meal is consumed elsewhere.

You don’t have to choose one system or the other

At our membership site at 5000bc, we don’t send out complete newsletters. Instead, we send out just a teaser every week. That draws the members in, and they then read and discuss the issues in what we call “The Cave.”

So yes, we’ll use the aroma system, but the goal of the system is not to just create engagement, but to do so in a safe space.

“The Cave” is password-protected and vetted, so you don’t have dolts just trying to impress. It also helps, because you get discussions and opinions between people who speak the same language. Many, if not most members have read The Brain Audit, they’ve done a course like the Article Writing Course or Copywriting Course. They understand the methodology and the philosophy.

You may not have your own “Cave.” That’s okay. Your blog or your website will do just fine.

You create the tease and pull your clients to the space where you want to engage them. Or you can give them the entire article in the newsletter itself, and then use the “tease” to get them to see some product, service, or course you’re offering (or will offer in future).

Both systems of engagement work

There’s no “right” form of engagement. You just have to decide which one suits your business.

However, if you don’t have a “Cave,” then yes it would be a good idea to draw people to where they can interact. It’s not the safest bet, but it’s a lot better than no engagement at all.

The purpose of the newsletter is to create engagement.

The clients are there to eat. They want to have a hearty meal. They don’t resent paying for the meal if you’re a great chef and you’ve given them an outstanding experience. So get into that kitchen and get that lasagna going.

You can use the aroma.

Or the entire meal.

Alfredo would do both, I’m sure!

Which strategy is right for you?

Which of the two email marketing strategies described here do you use the most?

Do you use one or the other exclusively? Or do you use both?

We’d love to hear your experiences in the discussion on Facebook.

Or we always enjoy chatting with you on Google-Plus as well.

Flickr Creative Commons Image via Bing.