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Four Reasons Why Email Marketing Programs Fail
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| Posted By :
2008-08-19 01:09:04 |
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Back in the year 2000, email was just making its inroads into normal business communications. Today, it's as vital to day-to-day operations in most companies as your telephone system. It's proven every time there's a hiccup with your company's mail server. Yet many marketers are still hedging their bets as to whether or not it is a viable medium as a marketing tool.
Well, let me clue you in: Email marketing is here to stay….and that means investing in both a list of customer and new business emails is critical. It's not just a strong suggestion: building your own in-house lists should be a priority. There is only one reason most marketers are reluctant to do this: it takes time and expertise. If you aren't already capturing customer and prospect emails, then you are going to have to put a system in place. Creating a system takes time and a solid understanding of email marketing and compliance. Today’s email marketing is fraught with all types of limitations. With this in mind most email marketing fails to live up to expectations. Here are 4 reasons why email marketing fails.
1) Own your list vs. leasing: Most reputable email list brokers will not allow you to take possession of an
opt-in email list. The fear is that the opt-in lists will fall in to hands spammers. So when you buy an opt-in email list you are blindly leasing a list (that you never see) and that your list broker retains. Your broker
will send your message to an audience that you can not truly verify as being qualified. And, as we've mentioned here many times already, the key to successful prospecting (much less sales) is all about reaching your decision maker( and I don’t mean maybe) in developing qualified leads. Owning and managing your emails as a part of an ongoing prospecting and customer service campaign, gives you the opportunity to pre-qualifying your leads before you even add them to your database.
2) With bought lists, not only are you forking out money for something you could be doing better yourself, but you are losing control over the critical function of who belong on your list.
Are you reaching your decision maker? Doing a mail merge and clicking send is so easy it feels like shooting fish in a barrel. But if you're buying your list, the barrel just as likely to be full of turtles, or boots, or outdated high school chemistry textbooks. You have no idea what you are buying, much less whether you are emailing your decision maker. And yet, you hit send with a boilerplate message, assuming you are targeting the correct person or level of contact.
3) Quality control: The on going management of this list is done by a third party and you have no way of
knowing what type of list maintenance is being done to keep the list up to date. Maintaining a list is no easy task as it requires ongoing verification and frequent updating. Keep in mind that you will never know the condition of an opt-in list unless you own and manage it.
4) On going fees: Each time you send email your opt-in list you are incurring on going licensing fees. Time |
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