“We tried this email marketing thing. It didn’t work for us, but we want it to. We know how powerful it is, and we already have a big list of subscribers. What can we do?”
That’s a phrase I tend to hear from brands that come my way and want to do better with their email marketing but don’t know where to even start.
So I ask them if they’ve ever used email as a means to have conversations with and learn from and about their audience, so that they can grow a community of absolute inbox F.A.N.s.
The answer, as you can guess, is anywhere between “No, never” and “Sheesh, we have, but that was ages ago”.
And that makes sense -
For the longest time, email “best practices” allowed brands to only notify their audience when they have something that’s important for them to say or sell, and only when it serves the brand’s KPIs or goals.
“You can ghost your email community in between these promotional emails and still make bank”, those “best practices” would claim.
But this is no longer the case.
Subscribers and customers are looking for a deeper connection and relationships with the companies they invest their money in.
So how can you, as an impact-driving brand, can cater better to your customers in between and also in your promotion emails?
The answer is feedback loops.
Let me give you an example:
In the past quarter, I’ve been to two “business for good” conferences - one in Amsterdam, and the other in Bristol, and both couldn’t have been more different.
The tickets to the former cost £2000, and entry to the latter cost £20.
The difference didn’t only stop there - The expensive one also had about 100x more attendees and was a 3-day event, whereas the affordable one lasted for less than a day.
So the operations here were on a completely different scope.
And yet, only one of them bothered asking attendees for their feedback via email (or at all).
Can you guess which one it was?
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If you guessed it was the £20 one, you were right.
What about the £2000 one?
The only emails I got from them asked attendees to invest more money into a new but related cause of the organizing body. They never asked for my feedback.
I can’t predict the future, but I bet the affordable conference will continue to thrive for as long as its organizers want to keep running it.
I’m not so sure I can say the same about the expensive conference.
Because if a brand doesn’t know what its attendees (read: audience) think of its efforts, how can they ever improve it next time or even convince them to give the brand another chance?
And when a brand doesn’t cater to its audience, does it even have a justification to stay in business?
Let’s take this real-life example into the email space:
It’s common for customers to buy a product for the first time, and they aren’t happy with it, for whatever reason.
If that’s the case, the last logical thing would be to sell them the same product again or ones that go well together with their original purchase.
Many customers won’t report back to customer service about their negative experience because that’s a lot of mental effort. Many would also not bother returning it to the brand and ask for a refund. Instead, they simply won’t buy it or use it again.
Without getting that feedback from its consumers, the brand is in the dark, assuming that all is going well and that customers are ready to “graduate” to the next phase of their customer journey.
But if that’s not the case, and the consumer isn’t happy, and the brand doesn’t know, do you see how upsell and cross-sell emails would come across as spammy for those customers/subscribers?
(In principle, I’m all for upselling or cross-selling to your audience… When it makes sense. We always need to look at the customer journey as a whole.)
So we’re back to where we started - Creating feedback loops.
Feedback loops are one of the most underrated yet most valuable tools a brand can use for its email marketing. When done right, those loops can drive more sales and more impact.
When I sit down with brands and help them form an email strategy for their next 3-6 months, I always ask:
“Where in the customer journey can we invite our audience to interact with us, tell us what they want, and what can we do better for them - while making it stupidly easy for them to do so?”
Do we add a quick feedback section at the bottom of every newsletter?
Do we send a “tell us why you didn’t choose to buy” at the end of every automated sequence?
Do we invite our top subscribers to have a chat with us on a regular basis?
Do we invite those who used to be in our top subscribers tier but changed their behavior to have a chat with us on a regular basis?
Do we reach out to other departments that have direct contact with our audience, like our sales or customer experience team, and hear what they’ve been experiencing lately (complaints and/or praise, both are equally important!) to provide email solutions or assets around those topics?
Feedback loops can be the make-or-break point of any impactful and profitable email strategy.
I encourage you to think about where and how you can include any or more of them across your marketing strategy as a whole, and specifically within your emails.
If you want to future-proof your business with subscriber-facing and internal email feedback loops but don't know where to begin - get in touch with me here. I'd love to help you out.
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