Email marketing: A love-hate relationship…Yipee!

Email marketing: A love-hate relationship…Yipee!

A love-hate relationship is defined as a personal relationship involving simultaneous or alternating emotions of love and enmity. This relationship does not have to be of a romantic nature, and may be instead of a sibling one.

This relationship also exists between people and inanimate objects such as appliances – sounds crazy, but we humans do that. In fact, just about everyone has a love hate relationship with the major appliances in their lives. The tools and devices we’ve come to most depend on engender this odd contradictory behaviour in us.

From our cars to our phones to the washer and dryer in the basement, we’ve come to expect the thing to just work and depend on them — we love them for what they do and hate them for what they sometimes fail to do.

Hooray! We have a love-hate relationship with email!

Recently I’ve had a few conversations about email where the term “love-hate relationship” popped up. It got me thinking that if we do (and we really do) have a love-hate relationship with it, that’s a good a thing! It means it has arrived as one of those “appliances” which we depend on can’t live without! Sometimes we love it and sometime we hate it depending on what it does or does not deliver.

We can’t afford to under value what the inbox means to people. I’ve come to depend on my inbox as one of my primary communication appliances. I love it when email marketers provide relevant useful information and I hate it when they waste my time with fluff or worse, spam me.

Show your email marketing subscribers some love or they will hate you

So email has arrived, but has email marketing arrived with it? When was the last time you sat down with your team and put yourselves in the subscriber’s shoes? Are you sending subscribers what they want to get or pumping out what you need to push? Have you asked those subscribers how you are doing lately? When was the last time you included a survey in your newsletter or on your website to ask what they want? You know (or should know) what you want from them, but what about what they want? You won’t know if you don’t ask on regular basis.

Your subscribers want to be able to depend on you for value and consistency. Don’t disappoint them by wasting their time with irrelevant content. If you do, they’ll know you don’t care about what they want and they won’t care about what you want.

Unlike those other appliances I mentioned, it’s we email marketing pros who have to perform regular maintenance to ensure email marketing functions as people expect it to.

Takeaway: Run regular surveys and ask what your subscribers want from your email marketing newsletter!