Is email marketing a “failure-friendly” channel?
Do your email campaigns allow you efficient trial and error without wasting significant investment or resources?
From our experience with email marketing veterans from a variety of industries, we feel that email failures are easy to overcome, and ultimately a cost-effective learning resource to optimize your best marketing strategy. However, we acknowledge that for some email marketers the fear of failure often bogs down creative, strategic minds as they conceive and generate their campaigns.
A Litmus.com article provided startling poll data about email marketers “fear of failing.” Of 1,010 survey responders, 11.3% reported that they personally knew someone who had been fired for an email-marketing mistake. This statistic might prove discouraging to some email marketers trying to think out of the box, ultimately stunting their company’s growth. So, we get there might be some hesitation, but smart testing of new strategies and campaigns will lead to much more long-term success than playing it safe.
With an exceptional platform (ResponseGenius for example… if we do say so ourselves), email offers instantaneous data about your channel and how subscribers are interacting with your campaign. You should embrace this learning opportunity by employing A/B testing – the act of comparing two versions of a very similar email at once – giving you and your marketing team concrete evidence of what works best with your audience. Thanks to built-in email analytics, your subscribers provide you the best quantitative data about your campaign without the expensive costs of general marketing research, polling and testing. Successful marketers should embrace their failures as a cost of doing business and use that information to change course for the better.
Email failures also can encourage diplomacy in the workplace. Especially in team-driven environments, normalizing experimentation and testing is the first step to becoming more data-driven, and less ego-driven. Information derived directly from subscribers can be used in settling disputes and encouraging strategic teamwork among individuals.
Ultimately, as a successful email marketer you must alter your perception of “failure”. In many cases, recognizing failures early-on often saves your business valuable time, resources, and most importantly money. Instead of harping on the failure of a campaign, re-assess your strategy. Very often, understanding what didn’t work leads us quickly down the best path for what does.
Happy testing! And may all your failures lead to ultimate successes.
Let ResponseGenius help take your email marketing to the next level – hello@responsegenius.com
