Email marketing presents a unique challenge from other digital marketing platforms in that it has a single definitive send. Once it’s sent, there’s not a reliable way of retracting the communication. So unlike your website, digital ads, or social media posts, mistakes can’t be overwirtten live at the source. So when mistakes are not caught before a send, how should you handle it?

A word of warning, every email list has a few sticklers on it that will often reply to minor mistakes they find in your emails. It’s worthwhile to respond to those individuals thanking them for alerting you to the error but don’t overblow it to assuming your entire list is aghast at your oversight. Many if not most of your audience might look right past the error. Analyze the mistake in your email send and make a reasonable judgment call on how to address it.

There are four options for addressing mistakes in a sent email marketing communication.

1. A Total Re-Send

This should be reserved for only critical mistakes. Examples of this would be false information on an offer/event, an incorrect email/template being sent, or content being sent to the wrong group.

If you feel that you need to do a re-send, it’s important not to panic which often results in more mistakes. Take a few minutes to ensure you are selecting the right groups to re-send to and that you have successfully corrected the error. There is nothing worse than doing a re-send only to find that you’ve made a second mistake trying to correct the first.

2. A Targeted Re-Send

This is typically most appropriate for inaccurate links within an email. In this case, you can effectively identify who experienced the mistake and target a re-send to those people only.

To do this, simply pull a list of those that clicked on the inaccurate link and send to that subset. A targeted re-send does require additional monitoring of the click report so that anyone that clicks after the initial correction can be provided with the edited communication. This limits the inconvenience to your larger audience and ensures a correction to those that experienced the problem.

3. Let It Ride

Sometimes the best action is inaction. If the mistake is minor it’s often best to leave it alone rather than inconvenience your audience with a re-send. Examples of this would be minor typos, graphical anomalies, or concealed problems (like html or image tags).

In these cases, correct the error on your next communication but don’t bother your list with a re-send highlighting such a small issue.

4. Strategic Follow Up

This is really limited to promotional emails but can be a way of correcting a mistake and reinforcing the offer. Example problems would be non-critical mistakes on an email but correct information on a registration page (like a missing digit in a buildings zip code where an event will be held).

Rather than doing a re-send right away, make a follow up email on the offer that corrects the mistake. Then resend it a few days later as a reminder email. This prevents the frustration to your audience of getting a second email on the heels of the first, gives a second touch on promoting your offer/event, and updates the non-critical mistake on the newest send.

Moving Forward

Despite best efforts and effective editing processes, mistakes will pop up in sent email communications sooner or later. It’s important to weight the gravity of the error in deciding how to handle it. The judgment really comes down to whether it’s worth alerting some or all of your audience to the mistake and inconveniencing them with a second send.

Once you handle a mistake in a send, it’s important to be diligent in your upcoming communications. An error once in a while is going to happen and will be forgiven. Consistent errors show a lack of respect to your audience and will erode credibility.

As digital marketing channels go, email marketing is the senior citizen. Email was developed at the dawn of the internet and leveraging that technology for marketing was not far behind. Of course, email marketing has evolved heavily through the years but what is its current role? There are two opposing views on the importance of email marketing which greatly over-emphasize or greatly under-emphasize its usefulness.

Email Marketing is obsolete.

The first outlook is that email marketing had more than its fifteen minutes of fame and it’s time to remove it from the digital marketing toolkit. This is typically supported by suggestions that social media can do everything and more, that no one looks at email marketing messages anymore, or that email marketing is just outdated like direct mail or faxing.

All of those statements are untrue and usually used an excuse not to attempt an email marketing campaign.

• Social media has taken email marketing’s place – Social media is a valuable channel but it can’t duplicate the benefits email marketing provides. Email marketing is a one-to-one conversation with your audience where social media is a group environment where you are intermingling with your whole audience. While there are direct communication tools in social media, they are cumbersome to leverage and not nearly as effective as email. Social media is a middle man to that direct communication and trying to set messages to particular people becomes an arduous task that email marketing can achieve easily.
• No one pays attention to emails – This is the sign of a bad email marketing campaign, not email marketing in general. Filters and screening tools have become commonplace on email systems but that doesn’t mean people aren’t viewing the emails at all. It means that email marketers need to carefully craft their emails to ensure they are delivered and offer valuable content that their audience wants.
• Outdated – Email marketing is as effective as it has ever been if it’s put together effectively. When setting a plan for trainer, consultants, and professional coaches, our outlook on any call-to-action is that half of the traffic and leads will be generated from email marketing. That’s true for events, sales, purchases, or free resources.

Email marketing is the only thing that really works.

This statement is typically relayed from a person that’s “done it this way for years” and doesn’t want to “fix what isn’t broken”. Fair enough, but just because email continues to work doesn’t mean it’s the only road to success. Furthermore, email marketing becomes stale if it’s done the same way for too long without injecting new ideas and technology into it.

Stubornly sticking to using only email ignores important advances and changes that can be a big advantage to digital marketing campaigns:

• Tracking – Email marketing offers tracking that generally straight forward to follow. SEO, social, or offline campaigns often take a bit more effort to interpret. This additional analysis is often mistaken as twisting the numbers or requiring too much work to get results. These channels are effective and shouldn’t be viewed as lacking when compared to email marketing.
• Stagnant – An over-reliance on email marketing is often a sign of stagnation. That stagnation is present in more than just technology. Typically the email list, content, and layout is catered to a core audience and sparsely strays outside of that tried and true formula. This skews perspective when other channels try to bring in a fresh audience or content. Unfamiliar content from fresh eyes won’t be as widely accepted but it’s the only way to grow marketing’s effect. Simply put, if you do the same thing you’ve always done, results won’t improve.

Appreciate email for the advantages it brings but don’t become over-reliant on it. It’s a core channel in digital marketing with proven effectiveness. Leverage that effectiveness but not at the expense of other channels or new ideas.

 

Often times trainers, consultants, or professional coaches use their own email or mobile inbox to test their email. While this can be a good first impression, it should not be the final word on layout decisions. Because email platforms, mobile inboxes, and personal settings greatly influence how an email marketing message is viewed, a more diverse testing method should be used.

The first line of testing an email is a test or preview option in your email marketing platform to review your layouts. This will provide a direct browser rendering of your email layout and is best served to check for potential glitches or anomalies. Many offer a scaling tool to see how the email will display for different screen sizes. However, it’s rarely fool proof as it ignores image disabling and advanced functions that some email or mobile platforms won’t support.

So that there are no false expectations, it’s impossible to test your layout for every possible scenario. Even sophisticated paid testing platforms don’t guarantee compatibility across the board. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t test on common platforms, systems and settings.

This is an important point because personal experience often drives inadvisable decisions. We got a simple example of this from a client reviewing an email layout. The client feedback said, “Remove the gray box at the top, it’s just taking up space. Put our header in instead.” The gray box in question was the result of the client’s email system disabling images. After explaining that the image was disabled and viewing the email with images enabled the client told us, “Definitely keep the header as it’s the graphical identifier for who we are.”

This is a simple example but one that could be expanded on. Suppose the client loved the graphics and made an email full of them. Every recipient with blocked images would see a blank email until images were enabled. What if the graphic didn’t scale to smaller screens? Mobile users would see a zoomed in version of the header without the benefit of seeing where the content began further down the page.

Don’t let your personal viewing experience dictate unilateral changes. Set up a layout and test it in a few different ways to ensure that a wide range of your audience will get a useful view.

Image courtesy of  Feelart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The discussion over HTML emails vs. text emails has gone on for some time and continues to be debated. Our general thought is to let your audience decide which format they prefer. However there is a situation where text messages clearly outperform. Personalized email messages, with a very targeted offer, and sent from a particular trainer, consultant, or professional coach often create a greater connection and improved conversions.

Sticklers will state that a “text” email is often set up with HTML formatting. For the purposes of this tactic, text messages means a simple text email; no images, no ads, and no marketing gimmicks. If you have an email template or signature that is typically used then setting it up with HTML is fine. Just so long as it does not appear to be a general mass-produced marketing email.

These text messages should speak directly to a very specific group. A few examples would be:

• An invitation to an event to people that abandoned a shopping cart or met with a sales person but never bought.
• A personalized offer for a report or article to owners or executives of past clients that deals specifically with their position or industry.
• A consulting session offer to people that no-showed an event or were invited but did not respond.

Every case has two things in common. The targeted group can be tightly defined so that the copy will speak directly to them and they have interacted in some way before with the training, consulting, or professional coaching firm. The message itself should address the person directly and have a simple statement on why they were targeted and why the offer pertains to them.

A key aspect is to mock the message up as if the trainer, consultant, professional coach or sales person typed it for that single person. That is why the email remaining text only is key. Some telltale signs of email marketing like unsubscribe options have to be included for legal requirements but try to push them down so that it’s not a distraction from the message.

Don’t overthink this process. The text email should be constructed exactly like direct mail merges with names and identifying information. The secret is to customize it enough that it applies but doesn’t come across as dishonest.

These personalized text emails often get superior response rates because they emulate a more powerful one-to-one interaction where the recipient feels a greater connection to the sender. For this reason, it’s important not to over-use the tactic because emails that are not suitable for a wider audience or that are sent too frequently will make all your emails seem deceptive.

So why are these types of email campaign rarely done well? That level of data mining, organization, and targeted distribution takes a fair amount of work that many firms simply won’t invest into their email marketing campaigns. But those that build these personalized messages into their email marketing campaigns can expect to see consistently better response rates.

Image courtesy of  watcharakun / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches have a lot of good ideas, strategies, and tactics that they are eager to share with their target audiences. Sometimes that eagerness boils over to form an overloaded and cluttered email marketing newsletter. Typically, it’s best to simplify an email campaign so that each email has a single topic and/or a single call to action. However, there are a couple cases where a more robust newsletter that consolidates several topics is advisable.

Here are samples of the styles:

Consolidation typically only makes sense in one of two cases:

1. Particular segment is receiving communications too frequently.

   Unfortunately, consolidations are often the first option that trainers, coaches, or professional coaches jump to if they want to scale back on message frequency. However, the first and best option is to segment into appropriate lists and deliver only the content customized to that target. If you’ve already segmented your list and find that the email frequency is higher than you have targeted, consolidating can be a useful option.

2. The email is designed as an index of information.

   Some trainers, coaches, or professional coaches produce newsletters that highlight timely industry or topical news rather than producing new content themselves. In this case, the goal is to be a valuable information repository that is amplified through commentary or editorials on how the information affects the email’s target group.These emails are better delivered in a consolidated format because only the original content (the commentary or editorial) should be included in the email, where the referenced material should be linked.

Consolidated emails have their place but be sure to verify that it’s the best layout for your email campaign. Often times consolidated emails happen because a trainer, consultant, or professional coach has problems trimming down their content rather than a true need for a more robust newsletter.

If you can manage to deliver your content in a simple way with more frequency or segmentation, do so. If not, then be sure that you are providing a consolidated newsletter that has direct relevance to the audience and makes it simple to scan so that it’s not overwhelming.