EMAIL MARKETING SUCKS

Words by Matthew Kimberley

Email marketing, when done badly (which is almost all the time) barely makes an impact on your top line.

Which makes it one of the greatest wasted opportunities in business, whether that’s B2B, B2C or B2 anything else.

Almost without exception (and there are always exceptions, showing us what's actually possible), the correspondence you get as a consumer from companies you’ve signed up to hear from is awful.

The customer journey typically begins with somebody responding to our marketing. We’ve found them using the various tools at our disposal and we put something out into the world to catch their attention.

In most cases, they won’t respond, but if we follow them around a little, and show them that we can understand and scratch their itch, then some will decide it’s worth a punt to see what we’re about.

Typically, at this stage, we’ve built just about enough trust to ask for an email address.

At this point, the prospect is handed to the sales person, who will keep in touch with them in order to seal the deal.

And once they become a customer, we keep in touch with them to keep as such.

Which is all very simple...

... which is why I’m perpetually disappointed to see mountains of leads and customers sitting neglected and ignored in company databases of all stripes and sizes.

Emails are not sent frequently enough, and worse, the emails that ARE sent out are generally of such poor quality that our prospects and customers are trained to ignore them.

And worse, the emails that ARE sent out are generally of such poor quality that our prospects and customers are trained to ignore them.

With subject lines such as “Company Newsletter June”, the best many of us can muster are self-indulgent corporate updates written like newspaper articles or memos to your accountant.

Your customers don’t care about the opening of your new satellite branch. If you make the mistake of thinking that they do, and you feed them these masturbatory missives, then they’ll vote with their attention and opt out, literally or figuratively. Your database is a group of individuals who've all raised their hand and said, “I need what you’ve got.”

That makes it negligent to ignore them. The salesperson - or account manager - is going to be following up one-to-one with the prospects and accounts under their purview.

We hope they’ll do a good job.

But it’s an inefficient process, which means we NEED to couple our keep-in-touch efforts with a scaled email marketing (or email selling and upselling, as it should be called) strategy.

Your buyers will make investments when the time is right for them. And, although we can and should speed up that process, it could take five minutes after introductions for some, whereas it could be five or ten years for others. The idea that we’ll be able to meet them when they’re ready if we’re not showing up AT LEAST weekly, is insane.

So consider this a call to arms: you’re sitting on a database of some neglected leads, or customers, or prospects.

Ideally, they've all actively raised their hands in the past and said “talk to me.” Or else, we’re moving into the territory of spam.

(Ergo, if you’ve scraped them off LinkedIn or incentivised them for their business card at a conference, skip those folk: give them to the salespeople for one-to-one outreach instead.)

And then get in touch. Show up. Repeat. Give them something to smile about. Give them something to think about. You can even forget about a hard call-to-action. Focus instead on a call to REACTION.

Sure, we want to train them to click and we want to train them to buy - and buy again - but that all starts with proving to them that the email itself is a worthwhile investment of three minutes of their time.

When done right, it’s the equivalent of sitting down, looking them in the eyes and having a coffee with them.

When done poorly, it still works.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in dentistry or affiliate management: the prospect of who's got you at the forefront of their mind is the prospect who’s going to choose you above the competition, at the point when their need overflows... or when you create the need for them, through your regular and delightful emails.

Their inbox is not crowded. Even with the promotions tab and the spam folder, there’s ALWAYS a spot for you in the prospect’s day... if YOU are a correspondent of value.

Your competition are emailing so poorly, that with just a little attention, you’ll go a very long way.

Matthew Kimberley is the CEO of Book Yourself Solid® Worldwide and the creator of Delightful Emails.