Who's your market?

A great post by the always insightful Mark Brownlow. Why Value Matters
I initially posted this because I found his illustrations very amusing. But then I thought about a number of conversations I had last week. Many of us in the email marketing arena can’t think like our recipients. We just don’t.
I think, sometimes, our inability to see email except as marketing can hamper our ability to connect with users. We spend so much time analyzing email we don’t always remember that it’s a tool. That there is an actual person at the other end of the transaction.
Marketers measure email campaigns primarily by dollars. And maybe there’s no other way to measure them. But, I can’t help but think that maybe we’re missing something.
And I think Mark may have hit that particular bullseye.

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Well designed email program

I so often talk about the failures of various email marketing programs that it’s only fair I mention when someone gets it right.
We spent the past week with family on the east coast. Our flight back to the west coast was very, very early Sunday morning so I booked a night at the airport hotel. That way we could just stumble to the shuttle at some horrible hour and not worry about trying to coordinate drivers and cars and all that other stuff.
As we were headed to the airport, I pulled out my phone to confirm directions. I found a new message in my mailbox offering me the opportunity to check-in online. I decided to see how it worked.

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Attention is a limited resource

Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time.
In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes available for marketing in a TV or radio hour and they cost real dollars. There’s only so much page space available for press. Billboards cost real money and you can’t just put a billboard up anywhere. With email marketing, there are no such costs and thus a recipient can be trivially and easily overwhelmed by marketers trying to grab their attention.
Whether its unsolicited email or just sending overly frequent solicited email, an overly full mailbox overwhelms the recipient. When this happens, they’ll start blocking mail, or hitting “this is spam” or just abandoning that email address. Faced with an overflowing inbox recipients may take drastic action in order to focus on the stuff that is really important to them.
This is a reality that many marketers don’t get. They think that they can assume that if a person purchases from their company that person wants communication from that company.

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The answer is 42

I continually run into companies that don’t really have a goal or understanding of their email marketing program. They’ve never really asked questions about how they’re using email or even why email is the right answer. Lots of companies are also diving head first into email marketing or the social media craze without having thought about what their goals are and what they want to happen.
What regularly ends up happening to companies that jump in without a clear goal is they get into a situation where their delivery is bad. Then they read a lot of best practice advice on the net and try to implement all of it. Sometimes that works, but other times it doesn’t. Finally they hire me or another consultant to help them sort out where it all went pear shaped.
My consulting isn’t about rote recitation of common best practices. Instead, I want to know about a client’s business and what they think about email.  The most frequent question I ask clients is: How does email fit into your business? What are your goals for your business? What is your value proposition?
Some of my clients can’t answer these question. They just tell me they want to use email and they don’t know what they’re doing and that’s why they hired me. Well, I can help them successfully send email, but I can’t help them decide what role email plays in their business. Those are the decisions my client needs to make. I can’t set their business goals for them.
When was the last time you actually sat down and just thought about your business goals? I know that sometimes it’s hard to find the time to look at your business and where it’s going. “Think about it? I’m too busy doing it!” But every business person needs to look at their business goals.
Once you’ve thought about your goals, think about your email marketing program. Is email helping you to reach those goals? How?
If you’ve reached your current business goals, what are your next ones? And how does email fit into those goals?
Sure, having an answer is good, but are you actually asking the right question?

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