“Abiding in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go aimlessly hither and thither, like blind led by the blind.” — The Katha Upanishad, 800 BC
And so it is with email marketing.
Or at least a similar metaphor is rampant in the wild world of email:
The blind following the blind.
Which is arguably more dangerous.
Lemme explain:
Business owners are under attack. By themselves. By the emails they’re signed up. And by the “email marketing 101” articles they read once.
The worst part is they don’t even realize they’re under attack…
For example, they write short emails that physically can’t have any persuasive oomph because of an article. Or their favorite guru. Or because a marketer on their team.
They overcomplicate their email strategy—which, for most businesses, can be as simple as offering your leads something to turn them into customers, and then after that, offering them something that turns them into repeat customers—because they “love” reading their favorite guru’s monthly newsletter.
They stop themselves from an “aggressive” email strategy because they wrongly believe that they’re their target audience. Since they’re busy and they don’t like reading long emails and they don’t like receiving too many emails, they project these feelings onto their email list. They either don’t realize that they have something valuable that will massively improve their list’s lives more than offering “free value” or they’re not confident that they have something actually valuable to people.
And so, they find themselves in a weird duality:
They created something successful and with a proven track record. But they don’t believe in themselves. And yet… they believe in themselves too much to give up the reins and outsource their weakness to someone who has a strength in that specific medium.
So, they just copy “what’s working right now.”
Only one big, fat problem with this “fly by the seat of your pants” reactive strategy:
They have no idea how much revenue their favorite gurus are making from their lame duck emails. My guess is it’s not much, at least for the few gurus I follow in my target audience who write god awful emails.
It’s the blind following the blind.
Everyone hears that email is the most effective way to get a return on investment. But instead of thinking deeply about the most persuasive ways to turn leads into customers and customers into repeat customers, they try to copy what seems to be working—not realizing that what they’re copying is not, in fact, working.
All the while hemorrhaging money at every turn.
Listen up:
It’s okay that you’re not an email expert. In fact, for most business owners, it’s not a good use of your time to bog yourself down with the nuances of email. But you also gotta be willing to give up the reins. Otherwise, the help you hire will be constrained and unable to help.
Morals of the story?
1. Don’t believe everything your favorite guru sends. And especially don’t base your entire strategy off of what seems to be working for them. Chances are, it ain’t working.
2. If you’re gonna outsource help, trust the experts (assuming you did your due diligence).
If you need help with #2, hit reply and let’s chat.
John
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