Now, as hard to believe as this is when it comes to marketing, and anything under that umbrella you are likely to have tried many things, so it’s not all that shocking that you didn’t make your first million from any one thing.
Let’s go through the short list and see if any of this sounds familiar. You have a great product or service, you know it, everyone’s told you so, and you want to sell more. You decide you want to try an email blast; after all, everyone raves about it. You know you buy from your trusted suppliers and retailers, so you think OH YESSS, that’s EXACTLY what I am going to do, it will be so easy and so awesome, people will dig it, and they will call. Perfect.
Next thing you know, you’re online signing up for the free version of whatever program. You say, “how hard can this be,” and you dive right in. Looks simple, they have templates, all you have to do is slip in some text and hit send to your customer list and wait for the phone to start ringing.
Oh…wait….My client list, where is that? Hmmm. Do I have email addresses? How many do I have anyway? Data base? What’s that? I think we use Quickbooks but I am not sure. Would the email addresses be in there? Excel? What are you talking about? DO we even ask for an email address or update our customer information? I have no idea; I’ll deal with that later. I have to get this email out today.
Alright, alright alright, CALM DOWN. I have about 5100 customers, and about 300 email addresses, that should be good enough. Yes, I can work with that for now. Let’s do this.
You manage to get into the template section, and you pick one. WHAT? A headline? Ok, I got this, how about “FALL SALE.” Sounds reasonable, I know, I know, how about “FALL SALE EVERYTHING 20% OFF.
YES, THAT’S IT.
SEND.
>>> Fast forward. It’s 2 pm, how come no one has called? I know, maybe I didn’t give it enough time, people are busy, they went to lunch, I will check again at 4 pm. STILL NOTHING??
What happened? I did everything right; I got the list, I got the program, I made the template and NOTHING?
Oh well, Email Marketing doesn’t work. Won’t be a next time for me, and if anyone asks I will be sure and tell that “I TRIED THAT ALREADY.”
If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Creating something is simple, making it work is the hard part. So, what do you need to do for ANY MARKETING effort to be successful? A few things, all of them necessary, everything coordinated.
This series of blogs will talk about why this effort didn’t go so well, and we’ll drill down and get to the reasons why. At the end of our series, you will understand why things didn’t go as planned, and what you can do to fix it. You’ll realize why you need an expert that knows more than you, so you never have to say those dreaded words “I tried that already, and it didn’t work for me.