“I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say to myself, ‘What am I doing this for?’”
This, the question posed by coach Bobby Knight, is food for thought for fellow email marketers with new campaigns on their plate to design and execute. If you can’t look at what you have in front of you and make sense of it, what are you doing it for? If it doesn’t make sense to you, or the message/call to action feels empty, how do you think the recipient(s) of your message are going to react? Keep it simple. Keep it brief. Keep it straight and to the point – much like the coaching style of Mr. Knight. No fluff, no filler… lay it right out on the line and see how folks react. If you find yourself in a rut, always keep the notion, “what would Bobby Knight do?” in your head. If he would just crumple it up and toss it across the court, perhaps you should head back to the drawing board.
“We should not have to push you to work hard. You should work hard because you want to be a great player.”
Only you can improve your email marketing best practices. You can read as many blogs, and watch as many “how-to” tutorials as you want, but they’re not going to necessarily improve you and your work. You have to practice and hone your skills. And when you feel like you’ve had enough, you need to practice harder and hone in even more. Email marketing is hard. It’s ever-changing, and there is no clear best answer available. It takes work. And only you can make that work happen. If you want to be great at it, you can be. Challenge yourself to put out inspiring content that demands action, and you will ultimately achieve the desired results you set out to capture. Make Mr. Knight proud. If you can make him proud, anything is possible.
“People change over the years, and that changes situations for good and for bad.”
Coach Knight has cleverly aligned this bit of wisdom to follow his previous thought. It takes hard work to be a great player in the realm of email marketing. You have to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in whatever industry you represent. People, places, things – they’re always changing. As is the way email is written, received and reviewed. You have to keep up with the times. And the times, as Bob Dylan so eloquently put it, “are a changin’” on a daily basis, for better, or for worse. Part of your job is to understand these trends, and roll with the punches. Else, you may see a steep decline in the performance of your work and the bottom line (ROI).
“Discipline: doing what you have to do, and doing it as well as you possibly can, and doing it that way all the time.”
When it comes to email marketing, there is no slouching around. Cutting corners will inevitably lose you potential leads, and may have many in your audience hitting the unsubscribe button. Create the content for your email campaign as though it will be your last. Pull out all the stops. Take an extra minute to fine tune the details. Your hard work will not go unnoticed. It’s when you start getting lazy that mistakes happen, and mistakes are details that your audience is bound to pick up on. If you can feel the eyes of Bobby Knight glaring through the back of your head you’re doing something wrong. Take pride in your work, and take to heart the words Mr. Knight has spoken above.
“The key is not the will to win… everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.”
What sets you apart from the rest of the playing field? As Mr. Knight alludes to here, everyone has the capacity to implement a campaign, be it via email or otherwise. Everyone is looking for results from said campaigns. So what are you doing that differentiates your work from the work of others? The easiest (or not so easy, depending on which way you look at it) thing to do is to get to know the vertical you’re targeting. Know the ins and outs, and know who you’re reaching out to. Keep your message relevant and on point, and deliver it with confidence. Prepare yourself for a win. You can’t just shoot (send) blindly and assume (and hope) the end result is going to be everything you dreamed it would be. You have to work for that. You have to put all your ducks in a row. Research. Get on the same page as your audience. If you’re speaking their language they will respond. If you’re not, they’ll notice, and will ship your attempt directly to the trash can, without thinking twice about doing so.
“Everybody hears, but few listen.”
Truer words are rarely spoken, which is why we have Mr. Knight here with us today to help guide our best-practice email marketing techniques. It’s a busy world out there. There is a lot of traffic in every facet of life. People are inundated with information all day long. They look for a second, but are quickly distracted by all the goings on that takes place in a given day. They attend meetings, but are quite often multi-tasking at the same time. They’re listening, but how much do they actually comprehend? There’s a big difference between the two. So how are you, as an email marketer, going to grab their attention for a few seconds in order to actually let your message sink in? How are you going to get your message to resonate and have your audience react to the call to action you’ve put in place? You need remarkable content. You need something that is the distraction of all distractions. The distraction that makes them mutter, “Oh, there you are,” under their breath (okay, or in their mind). They’ll respond, and heck, they’ll probably even forward this messaging on to their colleagues and friends if you’ve done your job well enough. This takes careful planning, and even more meticulous implementation. Make them listen without taking up too much of their time. If it’s powerful enough they’ll end up spending a lot of time talking and thinking about it, and this is added bonus. Mr. Knight made a career out of making people listen. People knew that no matter what else was going on in the room, or in their life, if he speaks, you listen. Take the same approach.
“I think that – not only do I have to change some things, I mean, I think I have to eliminate a thing or two. Not just change it, but I mean, just get rid of it.”
Of course, before you jump in and become a pro at email marketing you have to understand that one of the most critical aspects of the job is testing. The only real way to figure out if something is working or not, is by testing out your content, as well as your calls to action and subject lines. Test internally amongst a group of peers. This will give you a basic idea of what resonates well with them, and what you need to fix before you go live. Another technique is a/b testing where you create two separate emails within the same campaign and split your list into smaller chunks to see which one gives you better results. If one is worlds better than the other, blast it out to the rest of the nurtured list that you have on reserve (nurtured lists – as opposed to random contacts, are very important in email marketing, and will greatly strengthen the success of your campaigns. Bobby Knight has expressed that this is a discussion for another time). You may think you’ve hit the nail on the head right out of the gate, but when you send it out for testing and find that it doesn’t behave the way you wanted it to, it’s time to toss it. Get rid of it. Start anew. It’s not a complete loss, because no matter what you do, or where you’ve been, you’re always learning. And learning, according to what could be Mr. Knight’s favorite action figures, is half the battle.
“Failure, to me, is not having the desire to try. Having the desire to try is in its own way success.”
It seems as though Mr. Knight is a firm believer in testing, and he will stop at nothing to drive this point home. You can’t be afraid to test. More importantly, you can’t be afraid to try something you’re not sure is going to work, or is going to have an immediate impact on your ROI. You have to try out new things to figure out what’s going to work and what’s going to fail in certain aspects of a given industry. Truth be told, there will always be calls to action and subject lines that fall short. It’s that initial attempt at exploring uncharted territories that, as Mr. Knight so eloquently puts it, “is in its own way success.” There are many different angles to executing effective email marketing campaigns. Don’t leave one out to pasture because you think it won’t work. Be sure it won’t work before you do away with it.
“A coach should never be afraid to ask questions of anyone he could learn from.”
When it comes to email marketing, these words hold a lot of weight. In the world of email marketing, there is no real authoritative source. You can be a coach as much as you can be a player, and vice versa. The point is, as the authoritative figure of your own email marketing campaigns; you should be seeking the advice and knowledge of all the aspects of your target audience. Trends are always shifting. People are routinely changing the way they view and consume information on a daily basis. Don’t be afraid to seek this wisdom, as someone may offer you a bit of advice that changes the way you go about doing things for the better. Learning and accepting the tumultuous landscape that is email marketing is the only way you’re going to be able to navigate the slippery slopes, and the inevitable steep inclines. There’s no such thing as smooth sailing in this game. You always have to remain on your toes, and keep your eyes on the prize. Take it from Mr. Knight. He knows a thing or (nine hundred and) two about winning, and he also knows a thing or two about making sure you stay on task and get the job done the best way you know how.
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