Email Marketing – It’s all about perspective.

First, a true little story. I have a friend who sold penny stocks back in the 80’s. He was doing a lot of cold calling and he told me about a sales system he used.

He would start with a list of 100 cold names. He would call them with something like,

“You don’t know me and you should not invest with me until I’ve proven myself. I just want you to watch Stock X for a month. I promise you it will go up.”

Actually, he told 50 of those 100 people that it would go up. He told the other 50 it would go down. After a month, he threw away the 50 names he had been wrong with and called the 50 he was right about.

He would tell them to now look at Stock Y. He told 25 of those 50 that Y would go up and the other 25 it would go down. You can see where this is going. After four rounds, he had 6 people remaining who watched him pick 4 straight stocks without fail.

From their perspective, he was a genius.

What does this story have to do with Email Marketing? You need to look at your communications from the recipient’s perspective. A very common mistake in Email Marketing (and sales people in general) is to talk about yourself and all of the things you can do or all of things your company does. Most clients only want to know what you can do for them.

If you put 10 different points forward into your Email and 9 don’t apply to a particular reader, then the reader will wonder why he is getting these messages as they don’t apply to him/her.

Another story – A very long time ago I worked for a business that sold measuring instruments. Specifically, we could measure the amount of liquid in a tank. The liquid could be milk, sewage, gasoline, etc. The same product could be sold to many industries.

But engineers in each of these industries had very specific needs and these needed to be addressed.

The dairy engineer was very worried about bacterial growth. He wanted to know the product was smooth and easily cleaned. He also wanted to know that we could ship overnight replacements if one failed. Dairies cannot turn off the cows and production must be maintained.

The sewage treatment facility was usually a municipality and wanted low pricing, usually by a bid process.

The gasoline storage facility wanted to make sure the device did not put any electricity or sparks into the tank. The term is “Explosion Proof”. They also hated leaks as it got the EPA interested in them.

If we had sent out a Newsletter with a picture of a sewage treatment plant, the dairy engineer wouldn’t be impressed. He’d think “These people don’t know me”. So we began to create a series of Newsletters that were very targeted and spoke specifically to their needs.

We created a “Food, Dairy & Pharmaceutical” Newsletter, a Wastewater Newsletter, etc. Over time the readers began to think of us a experts who were uniquely devoted to their business.