Email Marketing: Email has become another way to interrupt people’s lives

At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, Jim Ducharme, Community Director, GetResponse, interviewed Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, about the greatest challenge for email marketers …

You can watch the video above, and here are a few of my favorite quotes from Flint …

“We’ve forgotten that email is a two-way medium. We’ve forgotten that email is a messaging medium.”

“We no longer communicate as if we were expecting some sort of give and take.”

“Email has become another way to interrupt people’s lives. The marketer who sees it as a way to restore relationships and build some sort of give and take is the marketer that will take email to the next level in his organization.”

“We don’t talk to people, we talk at them. There is no dialogue here.”

“People don’t read email because they’re excited to read email. They’re looking through their inbox for any reason not to read your email.”

How can you optimize your email marketing?

The above quotes clearly show the challenges you have to overcome as an email marketer. So how do you optimize your efforts? Flint suggested you think about how your customers view your email, and help them answer these three questions they unconsciously ask themselves every time they interact with your emails:

• Who is this?
• What are they asking me to do?
• Why should I do it?

Related Resources:

Value Proposition Optimization: 5 simple steps to discovering your value proposition using an email campaign

Crafting Effective Email Messages: How a recent experiment helped MECLABS researchers achieve a 104% increase in email response

GetResponse interviews from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013