Patience is Not a Virtue, It’s a Liability

In the online world, things move fast. Real fast. If you wait too long, you can lose money, market share or the attention of those you desperately want to attract.
Waiting to develop that perfect Facebook strategy? In the meantime your competitor just iteratively evolved his strategy in real-time and is humming along with triple digit growth.
Don’t have the budget for the high-end web metrics system but don’t think Google Analytics is good enough because it’s free? You could be bouncing visitors left & right from your homepage right this very moment.

Social Networks

Not building a following in social networks now? It’ll be too late to get brand ambassadors when you need them when your brand faces a reputation management crisis.
Don’t think SEO is important until you launch your marketing campaign? Organic search traffic isn’t a faucet you can turn on instantly.
Having too much patience in online marketing can hurt in so many ways. By the time you realize it, it’s usually too late.

Ask most small businesses, consultants and those new to the online realm what tactics they have in their digital marketing arsenal and they’ll usually come up with the usual suspects. SEO, Pay Per Click Advertising, Social Media and so on. Email marketing is usually not at the top of their list. It usually doesn’t top the list because they believe it will take too long to grow their newsletter subscribers or don’t believe in the effectiveness of the medium.

Email Strategy Not to Be Ignored

According to a recent eMarketer interview of Bill Nussey (President of Silverpop):
“E-mail’s greatest weakness is that some marketers use it too aggressively, and they undermine the value of e-mail for all other marketers and consumers.”
Why do most new digital marketers fail at email marketing? They fail because they haven’t established the most important aspect of this medium. Trust.
As a consumer we have to trust email marketers as we invite them into our inbox. Here are the general guidelines:

• Trust them to not sell our email address to a Nigerian spammer
• Trust them to send us periodic emails and not overdo the number of emails we’re sent
• Trust them to send us relevant info and not pull a fast one on us
• Trust them to ensure their emails are free of viruses

Some Final Words

As marketers we have to be aware that we have to earn the consumer’s trust at every opportunity. This happens before we send them their first email, it even happens before they subscribe. From the professional design of our website & logo, the information we request from them, assurances that we secure their personal information, right down to the copy informing them of what they can expect from our newsletters (and so on…). They all either reinforce a favorable view or turn people off to what we have to say or offer.
So before you launch your next email campaign; ask yourself, ”Have we earned the reader’s trust?”.
Doing so will make all the other metrics such as Open Rate, Click Through Rate & Conversions much easier to attain.