Failure Often Leads To Success

A recent Litmus.com article unpacked whether email marketing is a “failure-friendly” channel, creating an interesting discussion whether email campaigns allow you efficient trial and error without wasting significant investment or resources.

Exploring opinions and experiences from email marketing veterans from a variety of industries, it was concluded that email failures were easy to overcome, and ultimately a cost-effective learning resource to optimize your best marketing strategy. However, the fear of failure often bogs down creative, strategic minds as they conceive and generate their campaigns.

The article provides startling poll data about email marketers “fear of failing.” Of 1,010 survey responders, 11.3% reported that they personally knew someone who had been fired for an email-marketing mistake. This statistic might prove discouraging to some email marketers trying to think out of the box, ultimately stunting their company’s growth.

With an exceptional platform (ResponseGenius for example… if we do say so ourselves), email offers instantaneous data about your channel and how subscribers are interacting with your campaign. Many email marketers embracing this learning opportunity employ A/B testing – the act of comparing two versions of a very similar email at once – giving marketers concrete evidence of what works best with their audience. Thanks to built-in email analytics, your subscribers provide you the best quantitative data about your campaign without the expensive costs of general marketing research, polling and testing. Successful marketers should embrace their failures as a cost of doing business and use that information to change course for the better.

Email failures also can encourage diplomacy in the work place. Especially in team-driven environments, normalizing experimentation and testing is the first step to becoming more data-driven, and less ego-driven. Information derived directly from subscribers can be used in settling disputes and encouraging strategic teamwork among individuals.

Ultimately, email marketers must alter their perception of “failure”. In many cases, recognizing failures early-on often saves businesses valuable time, resources, and most importantly money. Instead of harping on the failure of a campaign, re-assess your strategy. Very often, understanding what didn’t work leads us quickly down the best path for what does.

Happy testing! And may all your failures lead to ultimate successes.