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How tone can improve response

The tone of your email marketing should appeal to your target audience. The better suited the tone to each of your market segments, the better response you'll get to your campaign.

Why is it important?

Email is a powerful marketing tool, particularly because it is less formal than print-based marketing and can speak more directly to your audience in a language they use and understand. Doing so makes people more likely to respond.

But knowing just what tone to adopt needs careful judgement. Get it wrong and you can quickly lose your audience.

How do I decide what tone to adopt?

As a general rule, the tone of your email marketing should sit comfortably within your existing branding. But tone should be moderated to suit the gender, age and generation of each target segment. This may vary if you are targeting a number of different segments. But the beauty of email marketing is you can easily send the same email but with a different tone to each.

Examining demographics and online habits will help to reveal the kind of language to use. For example, a female audience will usually respond far better to emotive language whereas a male market generally wants something more logical and direct.

The types of questions to consider include:

• What is the average age of people in the segment?
• Are they male or female?
• Are they from a specialist audience eg business or technology?
• Are they price orientated?
• Is quality their main driver?

How does this affect the language?

A teenage audience will respond to shorter phrases, buzz words and irreverence whereas an older market will prefer to read full sentences and will be turned off by slang or crude humour.

The BBC's Top of the Pops website refers to 'Brian McSplat-ten, Bri pelted with eggs during Dublin video shoot'.

The Corporation's Gardening site says: 'Autumn is a good time to prune hedges, to give a good structure for winter.'

The first site is aimed squarely at a young, teenage audience, hence the slang and laboured puns, whereas the gardening site is aimed at an older audience and is more factual and direct.

The use of jargon can often put people off – but it may not be a problem if you are targeting a group of technology experts who are understand and even expect it.

Give me an example

Virginwines.com and the Sundaytimeswineclub.co.uk offer essentially the same service but to very different markets and so moderate their language accordingly.

Virgin is chatty, witty and informal. It has a customer promise. The Sunday Times Wine Club is less familiar and more reassuring. It describes itself as the UK's No 1 wine club and uses more technical language, such as bin ends. Perhaps most tellingly, if you visit either site, both greet you by name, but one (guess which) prefers to use your surname.