Right, think big picture here, if you will…

What is the purpose of building a house?

Of course, it’s for someone to live in.
Okay, okay, try this…

Why do people run businesses?

Well, ultimately, it’s to make money. If it doesn’t there isn’t a business.
So…

Why do we market our businesses?

To get more money into our businesses to make money.

Big Picture Strategy

I ask these questions because to me, they are the most relevant ones to ask for.

A conversation I had this morning started off about an e-mail marketing campaign and what colours should be used, etc. (the usual design stuff) and ended up, thankfully, at the question of…. what is the end goal of the e-mail marketing strategy? What is the client trying to achieve - short-term and long-term?

And, when you get down to how the e-mail list could be segmented to make more specific sales messages ONLY to the people who want them, and that the content is not actually hitting the right spot… you realise that the colours are just as way to achieve that.

You could get even more bigger picture and ask if it is even relevant - does it create anything tangible and does it add to the whole marketing and PR strategy.

Garri at Holiday Pad commented on my recent post about creating appropriate signage on your website:

Yep, and how many times have I visited holiday rental sites in the past few years to be told, quite emphatically, that my IP is logged and I’d better watch out, or else!

It made me think about the power we have as web masters. Web stats give us information about IP addresses, repeat visitors, etc. to the point that if I actually have spoken to someone, I can see who they are and if they come back.

This proliferates when using e-mail marketing. Using Campaign Monitor, which I do, you can actually see if someone has read your e-mail, which links they looked at and who unsubscribes, etc. (if they open your mail as HTML that is).

I actually demonstrated this once to a client, explaining the ethical issues and the need to allow people to unsubscribe. He actually said that they would call the people who unsubscribe to find out why and see if they could change their mind. This misses the point.

What you do with the information you can get, only pays dividends if you look at the bigger picture. Stats are great for finding generic patterns that can help you make changes to the way you do things. Singling out individuals gets you nowhere.

It also scares your customers if they know how much you can see. I know one client who unsubscribed from our company newsletter when she found out we could see what we could.

Sometimes, it’s best to keep these things from your customers. Make them feel like friends, not like enemies!

I ran a survey on the Escape Blog last week, which not only gave me a bit of an insight into how people prefer their newsletters by e-mail.

The results so far have surprised me with more people preferring HTML but also some good comments.

In terms of the value of the blog post, it proved to me a great way of getting people to take part, to comment and to revisit to see the results.