Email marketing has proven to be a successful tool for reaching leads and growing sales. The web is full of tools and resources to help you create and manage money making email campaigns. You can grow sales and increase your brand perception by learning from this mistake we made with email marketing.
Our plan to grow
A few months after we launched we began implementing several popular marketing strategies. We setup our Hubspot and Mailchimp marketing campaigns, tested and tuned dozens of emails and prepared to launch a massive cold email campaign to our deep list of leads. I could nearly smell the money rolling in from all the leads we were sure to convert. It was game time!
Finally, the moment our team had prepared for! We hit “send” on our first of many finely crafted, highly focused, mother approved - email marketing campaigns. Now we just had to wait for the money to roll in, right?
Wrong! What happened instead was a public schooling of our first tough lesson as a startup. It didn’t take long before we started receiving replies and tweets responding to our email. Unfortunately, the responses weren’t quite the result we had hoped for. Instead of perking product interest we had created a wave of annoyance that was shared amongst disgruntled readers across Twitter.
One size doesn’t fit all
What went wrong? We followed the steps prescribed by others who had found success with email marketing, but why did this approach not work for us? The answer is simple -- we were sending SPAM.
The gist of the email:
Hey {first_name},
I saw you're using (competitors product) for monitoring your rails app.
Did you know we also offer app monitoring?
SPAM vs. Information
The message that we used had worked before with existing customers but what we hadn't realized is that the type of message that worked for one lead segment wouldn't work for another. It worked with folks who already knew us, but for cold leads who had never heard of Scout before, this didn't work. You see, what could be an informative email to one reader has the potential to be spam to another. It's a valuable lesson we learned.
What did we change?
The big takeaway from the marketing mishap was not a $5k increase in MRR. No, what we gained was invaluable lessons which helped us adapt our marketing message and find our voice in a cluttered market space. The message that worked with one segment of leads didn’t work with another, it was plain and clear. Furthermore, our marketing voice had to be authentic to who we were as individuals and as a company, not a cookie cutter of what worked for others.
As you grow, you’re going to borrow many great marketing techniques and strategies from those who have shared their success. As you contextualize and launch these tactics, take a some time to put yourself in your audiences shoes. If we had done this, we may have learned this lesson in a less embarrassing way.
Takeaways:
- Email Marketing is a great tool
- Spam vs. Informative content
- Know your audience
- What works with one segment probably wont work for another
- Find your voice
- No cookie cutters