Focus Goes a Long Way in Email Marketing

Having a laser focus is critical in email marketing campaigns.  The focus should answer one of two questions:

  • What do I want recipients to do?
  • What value am I providing my audience?

If the answer can’t be summed up in in a short answer, the email needs to be simplified.  There shouldn’t be a lot of “ands” in what you are attempting to do.  Decrease offers or abridge content.  Remember, email marketing is not an extension of your website.  This is not the place to show any and everything you do.  It is an opportunity to present a simple idea or proposition that the audience is likely to be interested in.

If you are saying or asking too much in a single communication, the audience won’t understand.  Rather than using time and energy to get clarification, they’ll just delete the email.  Have a laser focus that is easy for your email marketing subscribers to follow.

Internet and Social Media Marketing: If You’re Not Using It, Get Rid of It

Internet and social media should have spring cleaning seasons.  If something hasn’t been used in years, it’s probably not going to be, and it needs to be tossed.  There are a lot of internet and social media pack rats.  They horde as many communication channels as they can find.  The problem is that they never use them.

Be honest with yourself.  Without a dedicated staff, no one can keep up with every single communication channel available on the web.  Focus on the social media sites or online marketing efforts that are being used consistently and producing results.  Trash everything else. 

Unused profiles and vacant internet marketing campaigns are just a vacuum that can be potentially damaging.  Our ideal targets might find a blank page with our name on it.  The message delivered is that there is absolutely nothing we would like to say to you about ourselves and we have little interest in hearing from you.  Wrong message when the point is to communicate.

My challenge to everyone that uses internet or social media marketing is to ditch what you aren’t going to use.  Do you have a social media account profile you never check? Discontinue the account.  Do you have an email newsletter sign up form but never published a newsletter and have no immediate plans to start?  Remove the form.  Is your website still featuring the “sweet” animated logo from 1998 because no updates have been made in 11 years?  At least take the logo down, maybe take the site down if it’s that unimportant. 

These are just things hanging over our heads that will never produce any results.  Relieve yourself of the guilt of not using it and remove a possible blemish on you or your company’s image.