I was talking with a colleague at an event a while back and he was telling me the story of how he had worked with a well- known Internet marketer who had crafted an email that was sent out to a list of 60,000 people.
This colleague’s list was used to seeing email in a certain style and the email that was sent had a totally different look, feel and tone. The result? The unsubscribe request began pouring in one after the other. When all was said and done, a list that had been built up to a nice size of 60,000 was reduced to a meager list of… just 5,000!
What’s the lesson here?
It doesn’t matter if it’s an outside consultant, an employee, a ghostwriter or anyone else doing marketing writing on your behalf, you need to educate them on the format and tone of all your previous email correspondence with your list.
Sometimes a drastic overhaul may be in order, But, if you’ve built up in your list an expectation of what they’re going to see from you and then a communication they receive is incongruent
with that expectation, then you may have the disastrous results such as this marketer experienced.
I’m sure there was no malicious intent on the part of the consultant. But, obviously they failed to take into account the previous communications and the branding that had been done by this marketer.
If you or someone working on your behalf wants to change your look and feel, you may want to consider doing it in baby steps rather than all at once. Start with small adjustments on the first communication, then a little more on the next message, etc., etc.
Drastic overhauls can create disastrous results. Be careful!
