In marketing, especially in email marketing, we can single out seven sins, as in the Bible: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. An inattentive marketer, who is continuously rushing somewhere may commit any of them, and they may occur even in advanced email marketing. Let’s take a closer look.
1. Pride
Last campaign was great – you can be proud of your work! Or probably you see what you want to see? Too good performance is as alarming as poor results. When it comes to email newsletters, consider them carefully: whether number of newsletter views can be compared with click through rate? How often do such clicks become conversions?
Last campaign was great – you can be proud of your work! Or probably you see what you want to see? Too good performance is as alarming as poor results. When it comes to email newsletters, consider them carefully: whether number of newsletter views can be compared with click through rate? How often do such clicks become conversions?
To be proud of your work is good, but please don’t forget that software and services failure happens at times, and people can act as a crowd. If email marketing results are clearly odd and abnormal, do your best to find the source of such effect.
2. Greed
Once you can see email newsletter effect and financial benefit, you start thinking about increasing the volume of this channel exploitation. This may be higher newsletter frequency, including subscribers who didn’t check this option, and so on. A result of such greed is more unsubscriptions, loyalty decrease, and getting into the spammer list.
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Email marketing is efficient tool indeed, but it should be used wisely and skillfully.
3. Lust
Exploitation of physical and erotical in email for marketing – is commonplace, which is usually used by spammers. Yes, this topic is still relevant, but it is tricky as well and you should think twice before using it. Besides, most spam-filters are sensitive towards newsletters with erotic content and guard users from viewing them.
Even if your service or product has a direct relation to risqué subjects, try to be neutral in your newsletters, or ask your subscribers to be white-listed.
4. Envy
“How do they do this?” Rivals’ success can be for many reasons: another target audience, reliable IP-address, high loyalty level, synergy effect from other promotion methods… But envy is unproductive. If you try just copy your competitors, most definitely, the result will be far from what you expect. You had better focus on your own competitor advantages, analyze experience you have gained, use effective methods to the greater extend and get rid of the ineffective ones.
5. Gluttony
Greed and gluttony come along when we are talking about email marketing. By gluttony we mean a type of greed which pushes marketers to intensify newsletter frequency. In one of our email marketing articles “Three typical email marketing mistakes” there is an example of Toys’R’Us brand which sent 7 newsletters in a day. This can be called gluttony. In the end, the company receives irritated customers and unsubscriptions – not growth in sales.
The optimal newsletter frequency could be found experimentally. Run two or three tests, analyze your subscribers response (number of views, click through rate, conversion), and you will understand how often customers want to hear from you.
6. Wrath
It is just simple: if something in your client irritates you, marketing of any type is not up to your alley. Most likely, there should be a rule “turn other cheek” or something similar “customer is always right”. People flaws such as being rancorous, making a mountain out of a molehill along with social networks causing an instant viral effect, lead to the consequences, when even a very solid brands have to make apologizes for their mistakes several times per month.
7. Sloth
If everything takes its normal course, when sufficient ROI, CTR and views rate have been achieved, and they do not go down below critical point, chances are you can become passive and reluctant. You create texts for your email newsletters without any efforts as you think key to the success has been found. But it is not true. You can always try harder to obtain better results with your marketing email campaign. Do not give in to the sloth, strive for more. Experiment with the time when newsletters are sent, methods of link highlighting, a proportion between text and images, etc. Email campaign has a plethora of components.
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