Is email marketing dead? How about now? Is it dead now?
Email has been declared dead more times than Dracula, but here we are still asking. Some email lists have zombie-like features, however …
Answer me this …
Would you rather eat chicken tonight or have fresh eggs for years?
Smart marketers know to think long-term, panicked, hen-pecked (sorry) marketers are constantly scrambling to make quick wins at the expense of the viability of their assets.
There is a tendency to base our decision-making on the next sales target, next performance appraisal, immediate cash flow, pleasing our boss, or simple scarcity thinking.
Don’t.
Future you might hate you for it.
Your boss who you are so eager to please might blame you harder down the line if you don’t push back today.
Short-term “must hit this month’s number” tactics will bite you on the butt. Hard
Email is not dead.
Crappy email is dead.
Many of the people who say email is dead actually mean their email is dead because they beat it to death with sales email after sales email.
When those sales emails get fewer and fewer sales, they then begin pounding discounts into the ground.
After the discounts don’t work as well anymore, or they can only get sales WITH a discount, then they start to buy lists, the headlines and subject lines get more misleading, and … you know the drill.
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How Can You Tell When Your Marketing Is Stuck In Zombie Mode?
Are you under pressure to use “dark patterns” such as fake countdown timers, always having your product on discount, and eleventy “one-time” up-sells?
If you are in that position, put a stake in it and start over with some goodwill, stat!
Constantly ramming your ever more shrill promotions into an otherwise great marketing funnel will just clog it like a porta-loo at a 4-day music festival, and it will stink just as bad.
Successful Bloggers and Content Marketers Use Kindness and Empathy.
Be generous.
Instead of “making an ask”, build things that help people, and introduce those people to it.
Wouldn’t it be better than trying to hard-sell your product, that instead, people ask to buy from you?
- Who would get the most benefit out of what you do?
- How can you describe what you do in a way that the right people take notice?
- Which people would light up with relief and delight to hear about your solution to their problem?
You don’t have to give everything away to be generous, either, but the things you do make available to buy should have a clear perceived value, and make sure you over-deliver on that value.
When you treat your people well, they reward you right back. That includes the people on your email list.
Long term.
No zombies.