Digital Marketing
Email Marketing Isn’t Limited to Newsletters
And Yes, That’s Why Your Email Marketing Sucks
There is more to email marketing than newsletters.
If this is the first time you’re hearing this, then great. You can easily make changes to your email marketing strategy.
There are 12 different types of emails you can send as a marketer.
A newsletter is only one of them.
If your entire email marketing strategy is only about using newsletters, you’re only harnessing less than 10% of email marketing true potential.
This is how successful organizations differentiate the marketing emails they send. And how they achieve the most often claimed statistic on email marketing: $44 return for every $1 investment.
Because they are doing it right.
What Does This Mean for You?
Email marketing is not limited to newsletters.
If you believe that product/service discounts in your email marketing are the only content you can send, then you have to start looking outside your own organization and industry.
Subscribe to newsletters of other organizations.
- If they have email courses, enroll in one.
- Download some white papers or eBooks. See if they have some lead nurturing emails after that.
Study them.
Analyze them.
What do you like? What do you don’t like?
Take a look at this recent training I joined from Neil Patel.
Lastly, and the most important one when doing this exercise, look at it from the perspective of the user in that specific context.
Don’t wear your marketer hat; otherwise, this will make you look at the wrong things.
Oftentimes, as marketers, we are enamored by what we see other marketers do. But we will never know for sure if they are bringing in results.
Just ask yourself, do you trust the quality of a brand that is always on sale?
(You have a couple of brands in your head right now, huh?)
Contrast this with the emails that Neil uses in his SEO training sequence.
It’s all about adding value to me, the end-user.
If everything you send out of your email marketing software is a newsletter or a promotional email disguised as a newsletter, you’re not taking full advantage of email marketing.
There is nothing wrong with promotional emails. It’s part of your overall marketing strategy. But if it’s the only one you have, you’re playing a losing battle.
While you may see a spike in revenues after a sale, do that long enough and you’ll train your customers to stop buying at regular prices.
You’ll end up having to discount over and over in order to reach the same revenue level.
You’re not building trust and improving your brand image (on the contrary, you’re only damaging your brand…unless your plan is to be the cheapest one in your industry).
Do you want to succeed in your email marketing? Be different. Don’t do what everybody else is doing.
What’s the last email you sent out to your email list? Was it promotional? Or did it add value to their lives? Let me know.
Originally published at Ariel Lim Consulting.
