You’re about to hit ‘Send’ on your latest brilliant email solicitation. You want everyone on your mailing list to sign up for your “highly anticipated” workshop, buy your “amazing, not-available-in-stores” product and subscribe to your wonderful “breakthrough” service. You know it’s exactly what your audience needs to make their lives complete in every way.
Wait.
Did you forget to include a compelling reason for investigating your latest offer? Does your message suffer from any of the following email marketing sins?
- No actual details about all the magic included in your event, product or service. (No kidding. This happens. Sometimes we just expect them to do what we tell them, right?)
- Nothing about why they should care about your event, product or service.
- Nothing about what miracles they’ll be able to work once they’ve received your event, product or service.
- Nothing about why they want to move from their current way of life into your proposed “new and improved” way.
- Nothing about how you are reducing their risk in trusting you if they decide to make the purchase today. Definitely nothing about how they can they experience the event, product or service before they buy.
- Nothing about the support, commission or affiliate program (if these exist.)
- No link to that deeply informative page on your website for getting additional answers. (You probably lumped all the information into the same email didn’t you? So you’ll have no way of determining if they even read your email unless they actually sign up. Next time, just spare the lives of those poor pixels and send your list a one-way, direct mail postcard. That’s (in)effectively what you’re doing by committing this sin anyways.)
- No sincere testimonials from others who have taken the plunge with you and been better for it.
Sound eerily familiar?
Often, email marketing blasts stop at features and forget to sell the benefits. Or, worse, they miss mentioning both altogether. In these cases, they simply fail to remind us why we care. So—unless you want them to completely miss the point of your email—you had better make sure you are dialing into your audience enough to give them a reason to care. As you’re probably aware, we’re usually dialed into a different station: WIIFM (What’s In It For Me.)
Your audience needs to believe in you and whatever you’re peddling first. How do you help them do this? How can you paint a true picture of great benefits and a low risk to help them understand their own challenges? More, how you can help them overcome those challenges?
This is your mission, should you choose to accept it.
So, before you click ‘Send’ on your latest bit of email marketing brilliance, take stock. If a quick audit shows you are missing some key points, take the time to correct them. So what if that email has to wait a week before it goes out properly? Better you exercise some patience and get it right rather than send out a transmission that misses the mark.