Top 3 Myths About Your Email Marketing Strategy

Many business owners, both new and experienced alike, often bring traditional and seemingly innocuous assumptions to their internet email marketing strategy. Little do they know these subtle assumptions may actually have a devastating impact on the efficacy of their email marketing campaign strategy. To combat a sloppy or ineffective email marketing campaign, avoid these three common misperceptions.

Myth: Everyone is interested in what you have to say or offer.
Fact: Just as in traditional marketing tactics, email marketing strategies base their success on identifying and catering to a target market. You can segment your market by demographic (age, location, gender, race, etc) or psychographic (hobbies, preferences, values, etc). However, your internet marketing strategy runs into trouble when you try to be everything to everybody, and base your campaign on an involved response (or for that matter, any kind of response at all) from people from all walks of life. The reality is that not everyone will care about you or your message. That’s okay! In fact it’s a good behavior pattern. Identify that who do care, and target your email marketing strategy to them.

Myth: Your emails (and for that matter, your content) is so good, it’ll go viral.
Fact: Viral marketing is one of those hip Web 2.0 buzzwords describing the enormous and sudden popularity of a video, blog post, or other piece of content. Basically, “going viral” is what happens when content is so good you can’t help but share it. To get a reasonable sense of kind of content that undergoes viral behavior, look at your own practices. How often do you forward great emails? How often are they forwarded to you? In the context of your email marketing strategy, what emails are you sending, or what business are you in, that’s simply remarkable (and if you don’t think you are, what can you do to be remarkable)? And in the larger world of your internet marketing strategy, what are you delivering that’s so good is just has to be shared? So good that members of your target market pass the content along to others? So good that it’s worth flagging someone else’s attention to come check it out?

Myth: The bigger your email marketing list, the more valuable it is.
Fact: Just because it’s easy to send your emails to as many people as possible doesn’t mean it’s a smart business practice. Adopt a permission based email marketing strategy. That is, instead of scouring the web for email addresses, purchasing mailing lists, and engaging in deceitful or underhanded tactics, try attracting people with a message powerful enough to have them want to hear more. The most valuable mailing lists are those where every person on that list opts in, choosing to be kept in the loop because they want continued exposure to your message. When you incorporate permission into your email marketing strategy, your email marketing tools become significantly more effective and more profitable. Sure beats spam.