The Messaging Times

In his post, The world’s worst toaster, Seth Godin illustrates how technology can complicate the uncomplicated. In addition to his toaster example, he explained how it took 11 clicks to make a $6 payment to eBay. Recently, I wrote about my frustrating experience with an email subscription process. Technology, in and of itself, doesn’t magically make things more efficient. It can. But not by default. Efficiency requires some human thought behind the machine. It requires removing unnecessary steps in the process of fulfilling specific needs.

Making things more complicated than they need to be is a good way to lose business. Here are 11 more ways to lose customers, subscribers and girlfriends:

1. Make them work hard to get what they want.
2. Don’t meet their needs.
3. Regularly make them wait.
4. Waste their time.
5. Don’t listen to them.
6. Break promises.
7. Don’t take their phone calls.
8. Don’t call them back
9. Never apologize.
10. Talk about yourself too much.
11. Don’t show appreciation.

Technology has certainly made many things in life easier. I didn’t have to send a pony to your house to deliver this post on parchment. Technology rocks. But systems are designed by people, and those systems can be designed to be easy or hard for users. The choice is yours.

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?