Why is the Quality of an Email Marketing Campaign So Much More Important Than the Quantity of Emails Sent?

Some email marketers are under the impression that because email is an inexpensive medium, that they can simply click the “send” button and just keep firing away.  Email certainly falls in the cheap category, but it can get quite expensive when you send without keeping the repercussions in mind.  Execute your campaign blindly and you just may lose subscribers and damage your reputation once you are blacklisted by the corporate networks and ISPs that control email traffic.  When this happens, the road to recovery is often a long and grueling path where salvaging your reputation is not promised.  It just goes to show that when it comes to an email marketing campaign, quality trumps quantity every time. 

Email marketing programs are executed in a wide range of formats and frequencies.  For example, you have your monthly newsletters, weekly alerts, and even daily promotions.  Whatever the purpose of your campaign, the secret to making it a success often comes down to three key elements: relevancy, testing and response.  Here is an overview on what makes these elements so important:

An email campaign that fails to establish relevancy is well, doomed to fail.  This isn’t necessarily because the subscriber doesn’t want to here from you, but because your message doesn’t relate to their interests or needs, and offers no value.  It doesn’t matter how often you make contact, if your content fails to live up to expectations, it will be met with rejection every time. 

Testing is critical to various aspects of an email marketing campaign.  In this context, it refers to experimenting with certain types of messages.  For instance, one version of your message might be based on what has been identified as good strategy, while the test version is placed in competition with the winning approach.  The overall goal is coming up with the approach that generates the best response.  This is something that can be done with subject lines, as well as the actual content contained in your email.  

It will be very difficult to achieve success with an email marketing campaign if you do not provide a surefire way for your subscribers to respond and take action.  This is so important that you may even want to consider creating multiple ways to generate responses.  When devising your response triggering strategy, there are two key points you need to keep in mind.  First, you need to ensure that your call to actions clearly illustrate the action you want subscribers to take.  Second, you must prepared to act on that response with fulfillment.  

From a marketing perspective, the main problem with email is that the medium’s cost efficiency and effectiveness leads some to believe they can merely send as many messages as it takes to get their point across.  These marketers do not realize that just as easily as people opted in, they can opt out and click the little “report spam” button that kills delivery rates and ruins reputations.  If you keep putting quantity over quality, you could find yourself with a list full of disgruntled subscribers who have no intentions on doing business with you.