How to Flop at Email Marketing - 5 Failsafe ‘Fail-Triggers’

Author:

Cavan Downes

Source:

Tired of experts giving you long lists of ‘Must-Do’s to help you succeed at email marketing? Then here’s a much shorter list: five short-cuts to instant failure!
 
It’s very easy to find a list of best practices for e-mail marketing. Just log on and go to one of the dozens, possibly hundreds of blogs, how-to portals and consultancies - including our own - offering words of wisdom and the fruits of hard-won experience to anyone who cares to take note. Are they a scam? No, almost without exception they are sensible, logical and reliable, with the vast majority making more or less the same points.
 
Yet, against all reason, the lessons of Email Marketing 101 still go largely unheeded and the basic mistakes persist.
 
Why? Perhaps because they all focus on ‘How to Succeed’: a list of key steps to fulfil that will improve the results of email marketing campaigns. It’s easy to look at these as ‘add-ons’ rather than imperatives, and to fall for the temptation of thinking that leaving one or two of the list won’t make too much difference.
 
So, for that reason, we have decided in this article to approach the subject from the other direction: not ‘what will help you win’, but ‘what is almost guaranteed to make you fail’. The following are five key factors that, even if you follow only one of them, are as near as possible certain to result in an email campaign that will either flop dismally, or at very least not meet its purpose.
 
1. Neglected Data
 
Poor data hygiene, data from illegal and bad sources, outdated and inactive data, poorly managed opt-ins and subscriptions - in fact anything, however apparently minor, which diminishes the status and integrity of the marketer’s most valuable asset: the database. This is also, unfortunately, the most common of all ‘Fail-Triggers’.
 
Traditional direct marketing companies put a lot of emphasis on database management and maintenance. They recognize that this data is what puts food on their table. And since mailing cost is their primary cost of marketing, data quality optimisation also offers the potential for significant savings on marketing spend.
 
However, managing data is a very different discipline from putting together a creative marketing campaign. It is a job that requires a different nature of marketing personality too. It will never be a gratifying job duty unless the senior management makes it part of the MBO.
 
In reality, what is happening ...
 
Click here to read the full article.