Nobody cares

I began writing a regular LinkedIn post and realized I was getting a bit long, so I decided on a whim to just write this up as a "LinkedIn article." One because I wanted to get my thought out and two, I wanted to be able to come back to this.

I'm currently in strategy mode.

As a digital marketing generalist, I know a lot about a lot. I know how to create, deploy, get results, troubleshoot, and improve just about anything marketing related. It's something I take pride and joy in actually.

However, lately, I'm working towards the difference between incremental and explosive improvement.

Incremental improvement is something I'm also pretty good at - for example, increasing open rates by 3-5%, fairly easy for me most days. But of course this incremental increase doesn't last always. At some point there's a plateau, so because of that I've been seeking out what I don't know, what may have changed, etc.

One resource for me being in the B2B space is MarketingProfs and this led me to where I am now which is...

I'm in an all out war with MY subjectivity.

But it's made me question how do others in the marketing world handle this.

So here's more of the backstory... my boss allowed me to get a MarketingProfs subscription fairly recently. Since we're revamping our email marketing strategy a bit, I wanted to explore what's the latest and greatest information available. Enter Jay Schwedelson .

I powered through The Real Truth About Email Marketing (btw, really great course) and my biggest takeaway outside of actual tactics is pretty much how a marketers mindset can cannibalize performance. Pulled this directly from the transcript because it's so good —

Now, most email markets are sitting there saying, "We send too much." And I'm here to tell you, you're not sending enough. And you're like, "No, no, no, no, no. You don't know how much we are sending." And I'm telling you, believe it or not, you're not sending enough. And this is probably counterintuitive to everything that you've heard.

That alone is something that I've wrestled with because my mindset goes to we've worked so hard to "get" the contacts and we don't want our "excessive" emails to be the reason that they unsubscribe. Especially because we have a really great product and a really great team and I just know if we can get them to the other side (MQl -> SQL), I just know they'll buy.

Here's where I say... Girl stop the dramatics!

Seriously though, I don't want to annoy people.

It's my worst nightmare.

But again, Jay's words stopped me in my tracks.

On average, believe it or not, B2B marketers send out, on average, four and a half times a week. That's right. Four and a half times a week to their database is what they're sending out on average. Some marketers send out as much as eight times a week, multiple times in the day. Now, how can you send out that much email and it all still be okay? Here's the secret that most people don't realize about email marketing.

There's more...

Nobody cares. Nobody's paying attention to what you just sent out. It's not like somebody got it, the email from you like, "Oh, my God, I got this email. I hope I don't get one tomorrow." They're going on with their day. They don't remember. They don't care. But you sending an additional time for that offer is going to radically change performance.

Now I'm questioning everything I know to be true. Not because this is new information to me - although I'm not sure I've heard it exactly like this before - but because now I'm questioning how much of my personal opinion has capped my performance.

Moreover, he addressed something that seems obvious but I also probably needed to hear out loud here:

Now, what you're saying on the other side, and I know what you're saying on the other side of the screen is, "It's annoying. I get too many emails. I would never open that up. I don't have time for that. I would unsubscribe." And you know what? You are too close to it. You as a marketer are too close to all of this and you're signing up for lots of emails because you want to see what's going on. Yes, you're annoyed, but you're too close to all of it is what we're talking about. This is what works for major marketers. This is what drives response. It's nominal cost, it increases engagement, and it allows you to drive the performance that you need.

And that my friends, is where I am???

Finding the perfect spot — the distance between being too close it and getting the results I want.

So now that you've made it to the end, let me know, what do you do? Btw, even if you're not in Marketing, I'd love to know. I'm sure this is applicable across many industries.