What they’re really saying is, “We’ve not figured out how to make emails successful”.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone tell me that.
And yet, behind the scenes, this is what I see:
It wasn’t always this way though. I was with another company when I started going deep into email marketing. Like most Malaysian companies, our emails are: sell, sell, sell!
Each one looked like a brochure.
For a really long time, people ignored my emails, unsubscribed, and even marked them as spam. (this was painful). On top of that, I was paying expensive monthly software fees to send emails.
Out of frustration, one day, I started shifting my approach.
I started sharing stories. Eventually, my open rates started increasing. Some people would reply to me. People would receive my emails and go, “I wonder what crazy story he is going to tell again”. When I left the company, people told me they’d miss my emails.
The secret to email marketing that works
Pattern interruption.
Seth Godin calls this the purple cow.
Video marketers call this the “hook”. You’ve probably seen content like this:
It creates pattern interruption. Whoa… what’s going on?
Why most people fail with email marketing
Is because they do what EVERYONE ELSE does.
So they become like everyone else – plain and vanilla. And trust me. Nobody chooses vanilla flavor at an artisan ice cream store.
After years of doing email marketing, I now know why storytelling worked.
It wasn’t just storytelling. Besides telling stories, I also started using unorthodox subject titles, sending more frequently, telling people I read & respond to every email and more.
In short – I was breaking a pattern.
Nobody received the kind of emails that I sent before. And that’s why it worked.
Can you break a pattern that people are used to in your marketing today?
Build your first 100 email subscribers with me
Email marketing can work for most businesses. I’ll argue that EVERY business should focus on building an audience list.
Unlike social media, with email, you “own” your audience. Social media platforms are known to kill off businesses by closing their page down. If your business is built on an audience only on social media, you’re putting yourself in a dangerous position.
