If you are an old hand with e-mail marketing, you may not need to read this, though it’s possible you’ll still find that this blog post is relevant to you. If you are new to e-mail list marketing however, then you definitely need to watch out for these pitfalls. These are “branding” mistakes which you can easily make (and people do them all the time) when you send out e-mails to a new e-mail list. Here’s what you need to know:
My Only Offer is Price
I can’t tell you how many people think that they can make money with an e-mail list by differentiating themselves from the competition on price. This is just a terrible idea for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, no matter how cheap you think you can offer your product, someone else will offer it cheaper to undercut you. This creates a race to the bottom which will ultimately lead to you and your competitors wasting money while the smart people make money by differentiating themselves in some other way.
Second and more importantly, when you offer deals which sound too good to be true, people’s scam radar is alerted and they assume that you must be a spammer. This is a terrible thing for anyone who works in the e-mail list business to have happen to them and it will ultimately sink your business before it starts.
Telling Lies
I will never understand why it is that so many people who use e-mail list marketing think that they can get away with lying to their customers. Whether the lies are about your pricing being a temporary deal (sure it’s temporary – we don’t expect to be charging the same thing 10 years from now) or your lies are about what your product will actually do for your potential customers, both will sink your business quickly and mean that your e-mail list rental will be an utter waste of time and money.
Now that’s not to say you won’t get a few suckers to buy into your lie. But ultimately, if you want to use an e-mail list to build a business instead of grabbing money from a handful of suckers, then you need to tell your customers the truth. Just do it in a way which doesn’t make them feel as if they shouldn’t care about your products (i.e. tell them why it is a good deal and really do offer a limited time offer).
Spamming Your List
Finally, I see so many e-mail list marketers who spam their lists that I’m amazed it’s still being done. No one wants to hear from you five times a day. Even once a day is extreme. Stick to sending out e-mails every few days and be sure to tweak your subject lines and your e-mail content itself until you find that you are getting decent sales numbers and decent e-mail opening numbers.