Emarketing: Toddlers with Loaded Guns
I’ve been sweating over working on email materials (text and tips) for a client to to give to their resellers to use in their marketing. I’m almost literally sweating blood on the keyboard - I just cannot seem to get it down. Today, I finally realized why. I feel like I’m handing toddlers loaded guns and sending the innocent tykes to play in traffic. No matter what happens, it’s not going to be pretty.
Here’s why:
For every emarketing-savvy marketer out there, there are at least ten who still believe in the old interruption, “Hey look at me!” hard-sale approach. And, the clueless ratio is even higher for people who don’t “do marketing” for a living. Doesn’t make them bad or stupid people - they simply don’t know what they don’t know. (You wouldn’t, for example, hire me to do a financial audit. I have not the first clue.)
1. Email Should Be Truly Permission-Based. Just because you have someone’s business card doesn’t mean you have permission to send them anything (and that goes for snail mail, dead tree campaigns too.) I just got an e-letter today that I never requested. But, I did give the sender my biz card (oops!). I deleted the e-letter.
2. People Don’t Care About You. Way too much emarketing is all about the company and its wonderfulness. If you’re sending an email, stop and think. Is the recipient going to care? Why should they? Is there something in it for them? Big whoop that Acme has a new CEO. Why are you telling me? Is he going to make my bank account fatter, my thighs thinner, my life better? [delete] Ditto “Acme Wins Best Widget of the Year Award!” That’s nice…yawn, [delete]
3. Cold Email is Like Cold Calls. People hate ‘em. They may never even see them in the first place - the spam filters kill a lot of these.
4. Good Writing is Essential. Email should be quick, not sloppy. And, it’s far more difficult to write short versus long. Plus, let’s face it, some people just cannot write.
5. A Target is A Target is A Target. Knowing your reader/audience is just as important in emails as it is in any other marketing activity. A generic “email blast” may well lose more business than it’ll win (if the blastees even open it. ) Remember, that target is an actual human being who wants to read something interesting.
Related Post: Email Mktg: “Can” Isn’t the Same as “Do.”
Read More:
Opinionated Marketers on Email Marketing
Chris Baggott’s Email Marketing Best Practices
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Tags: email, emarketing
marketing, marketing troubleshooting, marketing communications
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July 9th, 2007 at 7:21 am
Mary - Couldn’t agree more with you on the pitfalls of e-mail marketing. So much of it is dreadful (which you only get to see if you actually open it, so that’s something of a blessing). But marketing folks (and the companies we work for) are often desperate to “do something”, and e-mail marketing seems like a good idea: it’s inexpensive and everyone tells us we have to use the Internet these days…
July 9th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Yeow - right on the money.
1. Don’t burn the list up with worthless emails.
2. Have a call to action.
3. Give them something the wouldn’t otherwise get.
4. Do you want to be thought of as “those guys that spam me” or “those guys who email me the stuff I want”
July 9th, 2007 at 10:06 am
I’m not sure why permission is such a tough concept for people to wrap their minds around, but it is.
Recenty, I signed up for a webinar. I got a follow-up email from one of the corporate sponsors (a different organization from the actual sponsor I signed up for the event with).
Bad but not awful - my first thought was “who are these people?” but the copy made it clear how I got on their list.
Now I get an email from them every other day, usually saying the same thing. It’s just annoying.
The best part: they sell software and services to help you run smarter marketing campaigns based using your prospect data to target communications with them.
Sigh.
July 9th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Ah, those webinars…and then I made the mistake of attending an association meeting and now they send me not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE “RSVP” emails for their monthly meeting every month. < Sigh> I could deal with one, even two, but FIVE? Particularly since I didn’t ask to be on the “mailing list.” But, since I know some people just don’t know any better, I let it go. I simply delete them unread.
Here’s a quick sanity check for anyone unsure about the whole permission thing: You wouldn’t expect someone to invite you into their house and give you money if you just showed up out-of-the blue pounding on the door and yelling, now would you?
July 9th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Ugh…it amazes me the number of developers and marketers who don’t get the concept of “Select Distinct” when pulling a list via a query.
I remember back in the early 1990’s the talk of the DMA was how we all needed to purge against the “do not send” lists. I do the same in email marketing. I keep a master unsubscribe list, and parse against it every single time I prepare to send. Then I run a “select distinct” query, to ensure I’ve only got one instance of ech email.
Why the extra effort? If you told me not to send to you I am going to respect that. And I’m going to do my best to keep you from wanting to be on that list as well.
July 15th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
Really great and relevant post. Might not be a good idea to give unsophisticated clients email marketing lists and tools that might serve as a loaded gun. They need to understand their responsibilities before running with the marketing strategies.
January 31st, 2008 at 7:39 am
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