I started my work life at an advertising agency working with creative directors, graphic designers, and copywriters. Thankfully, through my interactions with these professionals who are trained in the ways to make people want and buy things I’ve become aware of their tactics. While my career pulled me away from advertising agencies, the learnings from that era have always guided me to make better decisions in my work.

Today I am back to working with marketing professionals and as always my experience kicks in from time to time when discussing projects, approaches, tactics, target audiences etc. While there are so many resources on the internet that help guide us for best practices in the marketing world, I don’t see many that highlight some of the ways that marketers can either completely move away from or improve to make it better. So I decided to write this article to discuss those and hope it helps a marketer somewhere out there.

If I missed out anything or have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me through the form below.

Squeeze the lemon once

I can’t be alone in saying this, seeing the same message from the same company over and over in my inbox can’t be a good sign. I see many marketers do this, they send out an email, then they look at the metrics and see that some of the target audience didn’t open their email. They immediately rush to send the same email to those who didn’t open their email.

So there are two things to keep in mind with this scenario.

1. Email open metrics are unreliable. With Apple at the forefront of privacy, many ESPs do not return an “open” signal back to ESPs which skews our email performance metrics. This is not great, I know, but this also means that on consequent email sends with the same messaging the marketers end up delivering their email to those who have already seen the message.

2. As a subscriber to many brand’s emails, the moment I see them bombarding me with the same messaging I start to think they must be running out of ideas or they have a rookie at the helm of email marketing who doesn’t know how to manage their audience targeting or both.

So my questions to those marketers become:
- Do they value their audience so little that it’s OK to waste their time with the same email and risk having them unsubscribe altogether?
- Is their content that valuable that it has to be seen by all those who didn’t open the first email?
- Is the email open on the consequent send more valuable than the number of people who lose interest in your brand as a result of this practice?

Now, to drive this point across with some data, below are two email sends 1 month apart, to the list that was targeted previously but with suppressing those who opened the email in the first send.

Email Send #1:
Delivered to: 122,463
Open Rate: 29.88%
Unique Click Through Rate: 0.59%
Opt-out Rate: 0.15%

Email Send #2:
Delivered to: 60,435
Open Rate: 15.87%
Unique Click Through Rate: 0.26%
Opt-out Rate: 0.57%

These two sends are similarly timed in terms of time of day and day of week. The 2nd send was to the same audience as the first send but with those who opened the first send suppressed from the 2nd send, and the subject line and email copy are identical.

So, quickly reviewing, the values in the first send are fairly normal. In the second send the open rate and the unique click-through rates of the second send drop by half. Again, when looking at the opt-rate we see that this is quadrupled when compared to the first send.

So in conclusion, our audience has a great memory and they can see when we bombard them with repeated messaging and easily lose interest in our brand and offerings. To become better marketers we must value our audience’s attention as a finite resource. The moment we make this mental switch is the moment we can start making the most of our email audiences and deliver value.

Timing is everything

This is a common mistake when marketing teams make an email calendar that goes something like the following.

1. Send an email to event A leads with a discount offer.

2. 3 days later, send an email to a larger group outside of event leads to announce event A.

3. 3 days later, send an email to the event A leads with a last-chance message.

The above sequence of events sends an email to the existing lead pool with a discount offer and asks them to take advantage of lower pricing. This step by itself is great and works to move leads through the sales funnel, though adding it as the 1st step to a multi-step email campaign doesn’t seem the most intuitive.

The marketing team needs to build the lead pool as big as possible before sending discount offers and last-chance messages to the leads. The problem with the above is that the leads that come in from the 2nd step announcing event A do not get a chance to take advantage of the discount offer. Furthermore, the discount offer and last chance emails can be consolidated into one single email send and deliver a 2 in 1 impact. So the revised calendar of events would be the following.

1. Send an email to a larger group that’s outside of event A lead segment to announce the event thus growing the lead pool for event A.

2. 3 days later, send an email to the larger event A lead pool with last chance and discount offer messaging.

The second, a more consolidated, approach lets the marketing team be more efficient with their efforts and free up a busy marketing email calendar, and reduce the number of times a single lead gets hit with similar messaging. Again, the more redundant messaging we send to our leads the more likely they lose interest in our brand and this goes with the “squeeze the lemon once” section above.

Purchase Lists

The use of purchase lists is common among sales and marketing teams. When lead pools dry, organizations sometimes resort to this often frowned-upon marketing tactic to generate interest in their offerings. While this approach may create the leads the sales teams may be desperately looking for, in long term they are far from being effective.

If you are treating your brand like it’s a 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing, which marketers and brand owners should most certainly do, then the short-sighted use of purchase lists are just as bad as you leaving restaurant flyers at your customers’ doors. It will end up in trash bin, not read, will be seen as unsolicited adverting, spam inboxes, and most importantly, this activity will change the way people see your brand.

Many marketers who resort to this practice they see the 0.1% return rate as a win while what they don’t see is the impression they left on the rest 99.9%, which happens to be the most overlooked part of using purchase lists to generate leads.

In today’s digital marketing landscape, combined with traditional methods, competent marketing teams should be able to create leads and qualify them before passing them on to your sales teams. If you hear that purchase lists are being used in your organization treat this as a red flag and discuss with teams the pros and cons of this approach in depth.

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