The Messaging Times

In life, there are many things that we should do.

1. We should eat healthily and drink responsibly
2. We should recycle, reuse and reduce our consumption of waste products
3. We should be polite, have good manners and be ethical in everything we do
4. We should exercise regularly, floss daily and brush our hair one hundred times each night
5. We should stay within the speed limit, use crosswalks and avoid using mobile phones while driving

In email marketing, there are many things that we should do.

1. We should get permission and use double opt-in subscription practices
2. We should consider using horizontal menus rather than vertical ones
3. We should measure our campaigns using all available metrics and compile behavioral data
4. We should join email accreditation and authentication services to improve deliverability
5. We should format our messages with a growing mobile audience in mind

But in marketing, like in life, there is no perfection; and people are successful whether they abide by all of the things that they should be doing or not.

Sometimes, it’s best to avoid perfection in the pursuit of profit. To not get bogged down in the endless amount of shoulds and just get things done. Action yields results over time.

I’m not suggesting that you stop designing the mobile version of your email campaign or cancel your membership to the gym. I’m just saying that you can be successful even if you do. There is no standard recipe for success.

Email marketers spend so much time analyzing delivery times, link placement, HTML designs, open rates, click-through rates and subject line copy that they often overlook a key ingredient of successful email campaigns – value. That’s not to say that the analytical side of email isn’t important. But optimizing the mechanics of an email campaign doesn’t actually provide any real value to recipients, so it will only get you so far. In the end, email recipients are looking for one thing. Value.

What real value do you offer to your email subscribers? Are they getting something that they can’t get from your website? Is your offer sufficiently attractive to make them actually look forward to receiving your next email? Have they told their friends, family and colleagues about it?

Email-only sales add value to your message because they provide an offer that is only available to those receiving the email. This will serve to persuade recipients to stay on your list and, more importantly, read your messages to see what’s on offer each week or month. Of course, this will only work if the email-only offers that you provide are attractive enough to your recipients so that they look forward to receiving them. Just because an offer is only available to email recipients doesn’t mean that it is of any great value.

My deleted items folder is a virtual wasteland of promotional messages offering 30-day trials, 20 dollar vouchers and 10 percent discounts. These promotions are so rote that we become desensitized to them very quickly. With so many competing offers, it is getting harder and harder to get email recipients to take notice and even harder to persuade them to take action.

Recently, I received an email-only offer from a local hotel for two free nights accommodation. That’s value. But how do they win? Well, my wife and I will probably have dinner there both nights, some spa treatments and, most importantly, spread the word to others. Empty beds earn them nothing. Good value earned them our attention and business.

By offering real value to your existing subscribers, you have a good chance of keeping them on your list, generating more wallet share and simultaneously creating buzz agents who will promote your brand. Seth Godin calls this flipping the funnel. Getting your existing customers to market your brand, products and services for you is something that brand managers dream of. To make it a reality, you just have to offer something of value that is worth talking about.

When you are analyzing your next email campaign, step back from the statistical figures and ask yourself one simple question. What great value did we offer our recipients during this campaign?