Key takeaways
- Four common fears block brands from email marketing: getting started (perceived risk), time commitment, creating meaningful content and measuring impact, each has practical fixes.
- Is it risky to start email marketing? Not necessarily, there have been returns up to 139% and 88% of B2B marketers call email their most effective lead‑gen channel.
- Worried about time? Use a strong platform with automation and enlist a team or industry experts to reduce the workload.
- To say something meaningful, build content from intimate knowledge of your audience: their needs, desires and daily problems, also nail timing and context.
- To measure impact, define what ‘success’ means for your campaign (e.g., sales, page traffic, event participation) before choosing metrics.
Introduction
If you’re like most people, chances are you have at least one fear that knows just how to get under your skin. Whether it’s spooky noises in the middle of the night or spiders and all other manner of creepy-crawlies, these fears are just a part of being human. However, have you ever thought about what really scares you when it comes to your email marketing campaign? To help you face these frightening digital scenarios, and ensure you never become part of a nightmare in the inbox, let’s take a look at the four main fears brands must face, as explained by Miranda Paquet of Business 2 Community.
Taking the First Step
Naturally, the best place to start this discussion is with the hesitancy that many brands face when figuring out how to break into the email marketing scene. While it’s only natural to fear the unknown, the truth of the matter is that reaching out to consumers in the inbox is far from a risky proposition.
For instance, the experts at Marketing Sherpa report that many brands experience returns on their investments of up to 139 percent. In addition to the massive influx of consumer response represented by that eye-popping stat, 88 percent of business-to-business (B2B) marketers cite email as their most effective lead generation tactic. The moral of the story is that if you’re worried about taking on too much risk, you’ll be happy to know that an email campaign is far from an uncertain or volatile endeavor.
Juggling the Time Commitment
Once you’re ready to step into the inbox, Paquet notes that the next big fear faced by new members of the email marketing community revolves around the idea of being crushed by the time commitment that comes with this process. Obviously, there’s no denying that email marketing requires both time and effort to be successful. However, there’s nothing that says you have to shoulder this burden all on your own.
In terms of support, a strong platform from which to base your operations is a good start. This way you can take advantage of automated messaging and all of the other tools that help enhance email creativity and productivity. Outside of picking the right platform, having a team of experts and industry professionals on your side to answer questions and offer guidance doesn’t hurt either.
Saying Something Meaningful
Another major roadblock that businesses dread – and for good reason – is failing to say something meaningful to the potential customers viewing this content in the inbox. As Matthew Collis of The Huffington Post explains, the big key to generating the right message is to hit on relevant points. If you’ve ever opened up an email and said to yourself, “What the heck am I reading?”, then you know exactly why relevancy is such a big deal to this kind of marketing campaign.
Generating meaningful content requires an intimate knowledge of your audience. Their needs, desires, and daily problems should all serve as the basis of your content, but finding the right timing and context is just as important in your efforts to say something meaningful. If you can hone in on these major points though, there’s nothing stopping your brand from truly striking a chord with its inbox audience.
Finding a Way to Measure Your Impact
The final fear on Paquet’s list doesn’t focus on working up the courage to join the world of email marketing or the implementation of this approach, but rather how to tell if you’re getting your money’s worth out of a campaign. Unfortunately, the reason this fear turns into a problem for many brands is due to the conflicting nature of what constitutes success.
For some brands, success comes in the form of boosting sales and page traffic, while others simply want to promote participation in a unique or one-time event. Until you sit down and define what counts as a successful campaign, letting go of this fear and finding the right metric or measurement is a task that’s significantly harder than it has to be.
Naturally, there’s plenty of other email marketing fears that could potentially make a claim for a spot somewhere on this list – feel free to let us know if you think we missed something worth mentioning. That being said, if you’re able to kick Paquet’s four main concerns to the curb by embracing what you’ve learned thus far, then there’s nothing that can truly stop your brand from building a lasting and strong bond with the people that matter most.
FAQ
The four main fears are:
1. Taking the first step because of perceived risk.
2. Being overwhelmed by the time commitment.
3. Failing to say something meaningful or relevant to recipients.
4. Not knowing how to measure campaign impact.
Email marketing is not inherently risky: reports found returns up to 139% and 88% of B2B marketers cite email as their most effective lead‑generation tactic, suggesting strong potential ROI.
Reduce the time burden by choosing a robust platform that supports automation and productivity tools and by working with a team of experts or industry professionals for guidance and support.
Base content on an intimate knowledge of your audience, their needs, desires and everyday problems, and focus on relevancy, timing and context so the message hits the right points.
Start by defining what ‘success’ looks like for that campaign. Examples include boosting sales, increasing page traffic or driving participation in an event. Once goals are set, pick the metrics that match those objectives.
Define your success criteria, understand your audience deeply, select a platform with automation features and assemble internal or external expertise to support execution and creativity.
