January 05, 2025

Lost

There are many ways to tell if a marketing team is lost.

One of the most important metrics is new customers acquired vs. new customers needed to maintain flat sales (or whatever your sales goal is). If you aren't measuring this, you are already lost.

Meanwhile, we have email marketers. 

Here's how one brand treated me from 1/1 - 1/5.

  • January 1 = 3 Campaigns.
  • January 2 = 3 Campaigns.
  • January 3 = 5 Campaigns, Including 3 Within 9 Minutes of Each Other.
  • January 4 = 3 Campaigns, Including 2 Sent Within 1 Minute of Each Other.
  • January 5 = 3 Campaigns.
That's 17 Campaigns within 114 Hours. One every 6.7 hours. Throw out 8 hours of sleep per day and they sent me one every 4.8 hours.

Of the 17 Campaigns sent within 114 Hours ... a total of zero (0) featured any merchandise above-the-fold. Zero (0). Every single message featured a percentage off, with anything goes between 30% and 60%.

This is where the email marketer typically emails me (see what I did there), suggesting they are not lost, suggesting instead that the Management Team is lost because the Management Team demands they send this cadence with this style of messaging. That's fine. But somebody is lost.

Now, it is possible that somebody A/B tested these ideas and these ideas worked best.

But if the cadence was not A/B tested? Then the marketer is lost.




P.S.: Yes, my teams executed email marketing campaigns back in the day, and they executed campaigns where, at any time, a store manager could request that their campaign trumped the e-commerce message ... and yes, at any time, four store managers could request that their campaigns trumped the e-commerce message and we had to prioritize which of the four store managers got to communicate to the individual customer. And if no store managers requested access to the customer, the customer received one of ten (10) possible campaigns, all ten with the same core marketing message but personalized with a different merchandise assortment based on prior customer purchases.

My team did this. In 2004 they did this. They were spectacular marketers/analysts. 

So do not tell me how "difficult" your email marketing job is, resulting in having to send three campaigns to me within minutes of each other communicating different messages. Your email service provider would LOVE the opportunity to execute something sophisticated on your behalf.


P.P.S.:  My best e-commerce clients generate about 30% of annual sales from email marketing, and their programs are not communicating sale messages with varying percentages off every 6-7 hours. You'll know when your email marketing program works well when you generate 20% to 40% of sales from email marketing. Generate less and your email marketing program isn't working well as it should. Generate more and the rest of your marketing program is not working as well as it should.

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