Thursday, August 18, 2016

Marketing Pros Share Biggest Mistakes (and Fixes)

To err is human, even for the best direct marketers. So it is instructive to learn from marketing pros when they admit mistakes and then share corrections and prevention advice. A recent Direct Marketing News magazine article asked 13 experienced marketers to share their biggest goofs, how they fixed them and lessons learned. Here we'll share just their e-mail marketing stories since we have experience helping clients address the same issues via our e-mail list brokerage support and data services. For example, Guillaume Cabane, vice president of growth at Internet software firm Segment, relates how he failed to take segment crossover and duplication into account. He ended up e-mailing the same user five times in a week because the user appeared in multiple different data sets of people. The subscriber was not only irritated by the flood of e-mail but also confused by "similar but different" messages. The solution? Cabane notes that using data services to exclude recipients who have recently received other communications is one way to avoid the problem. Next the team at Return Path, a leading e-mail data solutions provider, cites several lessons from a failure to update an e-mailed webinar promotion post-testing so that the subject line "TEST" went to the entire subscriber list. To learn about their fix and how they made lemonade from their subject line lemon, as well as other cautionary marketing tales, go to http://www.acculistusa.com/cautionary-tales-marketing-pros-share-e-mail-mistakes-and-fixes/