June 13, 2007 :: 5:48 PM
Did they sell you a marketing tool?
Recently, we were helping a client review a boxed software solution for handling appointment scheduling. Part of what the company selling the software offered in the bundle is ‘marketing tools.’ In the same vein, another client recently purchased large-scale fundraising software – and again, bundled in with the core component, were these ‘marketing tools.’ In fact, the availability of an email marketing component is a significant part of what drove the company’s decision to buy the product. The reasoning: Now we’ll finally be able to do some of our own marketing.
Many companies are lured by the same promise – not realizing that buying an email marketing tool doesn’t make you a competent email marketer, any more than buying a band saw would make you a competent carpenter.
And soon after purchasing this email marketing tool, the problems begin…
1. We’re not really sure how to design an email…
This first hurdle was realized quickly and ultimately overcome by using one of the stock email design templates offered by the tool. It was regrettable, to a degree – the design didn’t reflect the company’s brand at all, and hundreds of companies before them had used that very email design. But they were able to insert their logo, at least, and accepted the compromise in favor of getting our their marketing piece.
2. We don’t know how to write HTML code for our email…
This second hurdle became apparent when it came time to create the email, and it was finally overcome by leaving out some of the formatting they’d hoped to use. They settled on bold and italicized text, which the marketing tool could insert for them. Their presentation of the email copy lost some of its punch, and again, they accepted the compromise in favor of getting our their marketing piece.
3. What’s going on with our server?!?
Sending tens of thousands of emails can slow a server down considerably – and in this case, with the ‘email marketing tool’ bundled in on the website, the server it was slowing down was the same one delivering web pages to people trying to act on the email. After all that preparation, the people who received the email and were moved by the message followed the links inside, only to discover that the website they were trying to reach was loading at the speed of molasses. If research into consumer behaviors around email is accurate, most of those people got frustrated with the website’s slow responses, closed the browser window, and deleted the email. Not only did they not act on the marketing message as hoped, they actually got annoyed with the company who sent it. This problem wasn’t solved; it was suffered.
4. Why are the emails I’m sending being labeled SPAM and refused by email service providers?
There is an art to writing copy for email marketing. There are words and word combinations you avoid, because SPAM filters are watching for those phrases. You’re careful about having just the right ratio of copy to images. No one at the company knew about this, and many ISPs and other email providers refused their mail.
5. Why did so few people open the email we sent?
As artful as email marketing copy must be, the subject line must be the Mona Lisa. You have one chance to stand out in an inbox, before your email is deleted along with the SPAM. Your ‘from’ name (the person the email appears to have come from) needs to be carefully chosen too. No one in the company knew this, either. No one there spends time thinking about how to make the cut in a recipient’s inbox or what combinations of words might motivate a recipient to open an email.
6. How do we see what links in the email they clicked on, and where they went in the website after?
If the company had planned for the measurement they wanted up front, this would have been an easy thing to learn. The email, website, and statistics program could have been optimized for getting that data. As it was, visitors coming from the email looked no different than visitors who just typed the website’s URL in a browser or visited from a bookmark. The result was that no measurement (except how few people opened the email and how few received it) was possible. If they DID do something great in their email, they had no way of knowing that.
To summarize, this company spent money (buying the software with built-in marketing tools), time (staff members who would have better served the company by doing what they’re expert at), and customer goodwill (they annoyed their recipients by sending them to a website that responded poorly) – in a concerted effort to dilute their brand standards (using a stock email design), weaken their message (due to not being able to format it for HTML emails), risk being blacklisted as spammers (by not understanding how email providers evaluate emails), and break the law (since this email marketing tool did not have built-in compliance with the legislation governing unsolicited emails).
To be a little more concise, the company expended considerable resources to put themselves at risk – if not actually do themselves harm and damage relationships with customers.
It isn’t the fault of the software provider, per se – they sold a tool and never promised it would come with the knowledge of how to use it. And their clients have said for years, “We want to be able to do email marketing.” Unfortunately, owning a piece of software doesn’t equate to being able to use it well or wisely.
Look across the landscape of your own organization, and you’ll probably find some of these tools lurking there. Maybe the administrative assistant has a tool that lets her make changes to the company website – even though she doesn’t really understand brand messaging or standards for web building. Maybe the marketing assistant has a tool that lets him create brochures and flyers – though he’s never spent a day learning about good document design or the requirements of professional printing. Perhaps the sales manager has a piece of software for managing the company contact list (or database) – though she knows nothing about good data structures or government-enforced security standards for protecting the kind of personal information such lists often contain. And it isn’t their fault, either. Somewhere, somehow, someone was led to believe that the possession of these tools equated to the expertise necessary to use them effectively – and more often than not, also led to believe that using these tools meant saving money.
The truth, however, is that these tools are taking competent employees out of their realm of expertise – requiring them to spend time doing something they have no choice but to do poorly, instead of focusing on the strong skill-sets they were hired to contribute to the company. And the result for the company is more costly than the meager labor savings – with the cost coming in the form of annoyed customers, damaged brands, and in some cases, even the risk of legal action.
So look around your organization again, and stop asking your people to work in an area of weakness. Throw out your misleading ‘marketing tools’ and get some experts doing the work for you. It may cost you a few dollars more than it does now, but the exponential payoff on that investment will come in the form of successful marketing – and a force of people working for your company, both employees and external marketing consultants, all doing what they do best. And that’s a formula for success far more powerful than any stack of giveaway software.
Very nicely explained, Jean. I wonder if Gourmet Gang will deliver some ‘marketing tools’ when our lunch comes.
The organizations out there need us to explain this kind of angle to them just as Consumers Digest is necessary to the average consumer. We are the Consumers Digest of our world and I’m sure explanations and demonstrations of this sort after revealing their value, are very much appreciated.