Business Growth Blog

I was talking with a client recently, and she told me an interesting story. She said people frequently email her to share that they really enjoy her daily email newsletter. Which is great, except for one thing: She only emails newsletters once or twice per week, not daily!

When she replies to thank them and shares that she only sends newsletters a couple of times per week, her readers are surprised. They really thought they were getting an email from her every day.

When I heard this story, it got me thinking about what this actually meant.

Sometimes I go an unsubscribe spree - I unsubscribe from almost every newsletter that comes into my email inbox. Even emails I like to read. After a while, I just get too many, and it becomes overwhelming. I never read half of them anyway. I hit the “select all,” quickly scan to see if anything stands out, then hit “delete.”

I tell my clients that email marketing is a crucial part of a business growth strategy. And here I am, opting out after opting out. So what's the deal? Is email marketing important or not? Here's my philosophy on what email marketing is really about.

There’s often minimal communication between sales and marketing teams about their corporate newsletter strategy. Publishing email newsletters is typically seen as a ‘marketing’ function, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Email marketing is meant to build brand awareness, but it serves an even more important role: to support sales prospecting efforts. After all, the contacts on your email list are the same people that sellers are actively trying to convert into customers.

It’s true that most of our email boxes are overflowing. We can’t keep up. Email marketing is becoming increasingly noisy, which is why we need to make sure we’re marketing across multiple channels to get maximum exposure to our target buyer.

When I talk about email marketing, the first thing most people claim is that they get too many emails. While that’s probably true, it’s still one of the most powerful ways to engage potential customers.

When people mark email as spam, it’s because they never asked to get the email, and it adds no value to them. The definition of spamming is “send the same message indiscriminately to (large numbers of recipients) on the Internet.” At first glance, you might think all email marketing is spam because you’re sending to large numbers of recipients, and likely not all of the people on your list have opted-in on their own.

The keyword to look at in the definition of spam though is “indiscriminately.” It means “in a random manner” or “in a way that does not show care or judgment.” Creating a customer-centric email strategy that focuses on adding value to the reader will have a much lower likelihood of being considered spam.

Here are five ways to create a non-spammy email marketing program that effectively supports the sales process.

When I talk to business owners (and some marketers) about email marketing, the first thing they say is “I don’t want to send too much email to my list. I just want to do once a quarter, or once a month.” People are very protective of their inbox. They’re already overloaded with work and overwhelmed with the amount of information flowing their way.

There’s no denying it: every time you send an email newsletter to your list, the number of subscribers you have goes down. In the world of email marketing, we call it your email attrition. You can’t prevent email attrition; it’s going to happen no matter what you do. Typically, companies lose approximately 25% of their email list every year. On the surface, that sounds pretty bad! But it’s actually not.

Email marketing – if done correctly – can be a very successful tool to keep people engaged with your company. But the only way to do that is to be extremely cognizant of what your subscribers want and need.

It’s not about what you want to say – it’s about what they want to hear.

Here are 7 email etiquette blunders I come across every day. With a few simple changes to your strategy, you can take me from a disengaged non-reader to an active subscriber that reads your stuff regularly.

Blogging and email marketing are increasingly becoming standard practices for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Creating content and sending messages is very easy now-a-days, which puts us in the midst of a never-ending data explosion.

Videos, articles, chats, streams, texts, emails, pictures…With so much content available, people have to pick and choose very carefully what they want to give time to. Only content that is relevant to the issues, thoughts, or concerns a reader has will get noticed, and only content that adds value in some way will get their time.

I’ve come across a few companies that are considering, or actually using, purchased articles for their newsletters.

I’m not talking about hiring someone to write unique articles for you. I’m talking about purchasing articles from a library that other companies can also purchase from.

I get why they’re doing it. Creating original content takes a lot of strategic thinking and mental effort. It can be challenging for ultra-busy teams to figure out a process to create their own stuff. What do you write about? Who’s going to write it? Who’s got time?

Having a library of content to choose from is fast and simple. However, there are definitely some important considerations before you jump into a plan like that.