More than likely you don’t think of your email marketing as ego-centric. Let’s talk about how the focus of your emails is defined. Your marketing is ego-centric if:
- You send emails telling the recipients about your product or service and how good it is…even if you frame it as a benefit to the prospect.
- Your email is viewed as an interruption of the prospect’s day instead of something that has value.
- Repurposed product and sales information. Instead of creating content for the prospect, the company pulls out content that was previously used in print or in person to close sales.
- You have not taken the time to know what the buyer wants. After all, you are in the business for profit.
- Your language is pointed “at” the customer, not “for” the customer. There is a difference.
Even when your message is based on content that the prospect wants, your email marketing efforts are 100% vender supported.
Good Intentions Turned Bad
Many times these companies will testify that email marketing does not work. They went into developing email campaigns with the best intentions, only to experience low buyer engagement and trust. They get little or no traction in increasing subscriber rates and the inbound links are negligible.
They are faced with a major decision at this point. Whether to: Give up…with clear evidence to them that email marketing is a waste of time and money – OR – Step up…by recognizing the need to earn buyer trust. When the step up to becoming buyer-centric, their emails are valuable to the recipients. That is when email marketing can become a source of income, rather than an expense.
Curated Content
Even when the content is buyer-centric, it can fall flat when it comes to buyer trust. If all the content pushed out to the prospect gives a prejudiced view because it is all internally created, buyers hesitate to swallow everything they read.
Good content at least links out to third parties to validate the opinion of the company’s content creators. It is a good idea to mix in content from other buyers, expert opinions written in trade publications and vendors who bring a new voice into the communication.
When you curate content from outside of your company, the buyer perceives that you are listening to their problems and offering a one-stop source of knowledge.
With this shift in perception, interactions become more rich and relevant. As interactions grow, marketers are equipped with real world feedback and insight from the buyers. When this information is combined with the metrics recorded on the CRM dashboard, the company becomes much smarter in reaching new prospects and profits increase.
When organizations send out a customer-centric variety of information to customers, email marketing works great.