One of my favorite quotes is from Benjamin Franklin who said “A mistake is truly a mistake if you learn nothing from it.” And I think the same thing is true with our marketing efforts.
Many times we start a project or task and it doesn’t go exactly the way we planned. That includes the biggest project to the smallest task.
I think it is important to focus on the positive and not beat your self up on the negatives.
Let’s start with a simple example, say you send out an email to your subscribers and you don’t receive the results you wanted. Maybe you didn’t get any sales from this email and as always you’re hoping for at least one or two.
Your first thought was “oh that was a failure”, and then you second-guess yourself before sending out another email.
Before you can truly call it a failed attempt you first must look at the data.
Some data points you should look at is:
- How many people did I send it to?
- How many people opened it?
- How many people clicked a link inside that email?
This is where most people stop looking at the data.
Sure this will tell you your conversions, open rate, click through rate etc. But there are some other things you can look at and learn from.
- What day did I send this on?
- What time of day was it sent?
- What subject line did I use?
- Did I use a recognizable From Address?
- Did the links stand out or where they hidden in the email?
- Did I give them more than one link to click on?
I think you can see where I’m going here. By evaluating the variables of what may have gone wrong you can turn those in to positives by making a few adjustments.
Try sending on a different day, try afternoon instead of morning. Add 3 links instead of one and so forth.
Many times we focus on the email and assume that’s the problem we don’t even consider that possibly the issue is where they’re going after the click the link in the email.
- Did you test the link yourself to see if it worked?
- Does the email message coincide with the message on the page?
- Is the site relevant to the message in the email?
- Does the offering in the email and or targeted site even relate to the list you are sending it too?
Some times we rush the email just to get it out and then wonder why it failed. By asking yourself these questions ahead of time or looking at the results after the fact you can adjust and try again (not give up) and get better results on each project or task moving forward.
