Imagine you are going to advertise for someone to be in total charge of your email marketing campaigns. What personal attributes would you put as essential for the post?
The successful candidate will:
1/ Treat the subscribers to the email marketing list as individuals.
Email marketing is in essence relationship building and conveying the fact that the company values each individual is an essential skill.
2/ Accept that they don’t know everything.
Nothing is set in stone. Email marketing changes consistently through outside pressures. There is a mass of published research which suggests that goal posts have a wander lust.
3/ Have a passion for experiment.
Status quo is Latin for going backwards. We must modify our procedures in response to the returns from email marketing campaigns. Segmenting email lists to discover better ways of doing things should be a hobby.
4/ Able to push limits.
With tight margins, there is no safe alternative. You have to test the boundaries rather than follow the leaders in the field.
5/ Work within legal requirements.
There are limits to how far you can go. The harm that a company suffers if it is revealed they have transgressed the law is tremendous. Know where the line is drawn and keep to the right side of it, if only just.
6/ Imagine.
The first thought that comes to mind when seeing an inventive marketing email is: ‘That’s clever.’ But that is the wrong descriptor. It is imaginative. You do not have to be intelligent, or even rather clever, to come up with ideas for something that will grab the attention of a subscriber. Be creative.
7/ Respond to the needs of the subscriber.
Your email marketing software will give returns that will indicate what you are doing right as well as what you are doing wrong. If there is an increase in completions when emails are sent at 5am on a Thursday, then it is no use sending them late Friday afternoon because that is the most convenient time for you. A rather simplistic example, but it is all but certain that some of your methods are designed to service your needs rather than those of your customer. Discover them and eliminate.
