Selling Your Vision: Adapting and Evolving - Adapting to Change
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Part one: the rules change, live with it
Unless you are a big mover in the Internet industry, you don’t have much say over the deliverability aspect of your emails. Sometimes solicited emails don’t get through the spam filters of email providers! Sometimes personal email gets bumped into the “bulk mail” box if the filter believes it looks suspicious. As an email marketer, you learn the new terrain, adapt and move on.
Part two: the industry changes, adapt or die
Products get obsolescent. A few years ago pop ups were the “thing” in Internet marketing; users actually clicked on them. Now pop up blockers are hot. A few years ago, search engines such as Excite and Lycos prospered when the services search engines offered were similar to a commodity. Now the industry is an oligopoly/monopoly of the top three with Google as head honcho.
Services get new standards, customers get more informed, industries change with time. Whatever industry you are in now is facing competition from all over the world. Your next major competitor may be a teenage Filipino with a laptop and a dial up connection. Your vision has to adapt with the changing times. You cannot be offering content or products in a format which the industry left several months ago and expect the prospect to catch your vision, let alone buy it.
Passion Up Cards went into a tailspin because they did not change their mailing strategy as the deliverability rules changed. Yahoo filed a suit against them for spamming and they went from being a major online e-card provider to being just another failed e-business.
Part three: the customer changes, situation normal
Market research is a great concept, and market research should actually be done. But if facts on the ground contradict market research, you can choose to put your head in the market research and get run over, or you can chase the facts. Imagine that your market research told you most of your traffic comes from paid search engine listings; you optimize around paid listings and maybe grudgingly put up an affiliate page -- then you discover that most of your traffic comes from your referral sites...and one day, a particular site did a review of yours and boom, you run out of bandwidth. The facts say one thing and the research said another.
The same is true with your ezine. If you assumed most people that will sign up for your newsletter are teenagers (assuming your content and offers were designed with teenagers in mind), and you later discover that young professionals make up 70 percent of your subscribers, you should find a way to enlarge whatever segment attracts the young professionals pretty quickly. I will look deeper into this illustration when I write about focusing your ezine.
Note that apart from adapting your vision, you should also have a vision in the first place. Even if you are not selling anything, it is important to identify your email with something. Of your newsletter offers email tips, your vision could be “creating and delivering emails that persuade” by “providing creative email copy and delivery options for your business!” Even if you are not an ad agency, it actually works because your subscriber identifies your email with “emails that persuade.”
Next: Focus your ezine >>
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