Many marketers do not check their email marketing strategy before they hit send and that’s a serious problem. In order for the industry to thrive and maintain relevance, a marketer must have data (not a hunch) people expect that next email. If you aren’t measuring and assessing how your last email performed (and why), you’re doing it wrong.
I hypothesize one cause of the problem is due to email marketing software is too easy. Convenience can be dangeous when anyone and their boss can send a mass email to all past, present and potential customers. Trust me when I say a lot of the email marketing services out there are very powerful and able to send hundreds of emails per second.
Don’t get me wrong – email marketing software isn’t “easy” when it comes to segmentation or launching a highly targeted email marketing and campaign. For that, it’s complex and can be mind-boggling to even the most savviest email marketer. Instead, many email marketing apps make it easy to cause big mistakes. Those mistakes can result in undesirable unsubscribes, treacherous spam complaints or even being dropped entirely by your email marketing provider. Nobody wants that, but it’s remarkably easy to do it.
So, what’s the solution? Learn and push your email marketing software to its limits. Understand how it offers segmentation, automation and know what will entice your subscribers to act. In a majority of instances, what sounds good in the morning to send might be better to send later that week – or not even at all. Thinking like your subscriber is huge for understanding what will provide them value. In fact, eMarketer recently published a report that concludes that list fatigue (age + lack of relevance) is why most people lose interest in emails sent by businesses.
(On that note, Infusionsoft provides a ton of features within the software and plenty of excellent documentation so you can build a highly-targeted campaign for your business.)
Effective email marketers practice discipline. It takes patience to analyze the metrics and activity with their email marketing software. It takes a thoughtful leader to make decisions that support the interests of the subscriber over the business.
Like sending email at 1:30 AM to your co-workers, it’s probably a good idea to draft it up and revisit it after several hours. Your email marketing shouldn’t differ. (And yes, I have been guilty of this and my co-workers probably are nodding in agreement.)
As marketers, in our next email marketing campaign, can we commit to segment and fine-tune our list before we hit send?
How are you “aiming” before sending? Share your insight in the comments below!
[Image credit: no3rdw]
Posted In: Email Marketing
