Check out your most recent campaign statistics. Did your customers buy the products you were promoting in the email, or did they veer off and buy a bunch of different items?
Emails, like Google and Facebook ads, affiliate relationships, and content marketing, are traffic generators. Good marketers get great traffic from email; great marketers get great conversions from email.
But customers tend to buy items that they’re interested in, not just what you’re selling them. The customer journey is simply not linear.
For that reason, brands throw their hands up in the air and say that email doesn’t work because subscribers didn’t buy what they were promoting, blaming their results on their subscribers.
The real blame is on their marketing philosophy. You’ll learn later on that email and SMS comes down to sending the right person the right message at the right time and repeating it over and over.
By focusing on segmentation and personalization, brands will learn IF they have an audience for the promotion and IF it’s worth promoting.
For everyone else, subscribers will buy whatever they’re in the market for at this current time. So, the path to purchase is simply not linear.
Subscribers may get an email and decide to buy something else within the email or something else that may have jogged their memory. Brands need to accept that and realize that email is a traffic generator as well. Brands that expect a 100% DIRECT correlation between product emails and product sales every time are why they fail at email & SMS.
Here is the fifth reason I will continue with the next reason in my next blog post on Reason why Brands Fail at Email & SMS.