"E-marketing" is just marketing that takes place over the Internet. I know, deep. But stay with me. Because it has the letter "e" in front of it, people often get anxious that there might be some hidden 'new rules' and 'secrets' that only true e-commerce and Internet gurus know about. As a result, plenty of smart people make plenty of silly mistakes when it comes to marketing within this medium. Let's start with the first, which crystallizes what we've just mentioned.
MISTAKE: Believing That Some New Set Of E-Marketing Rules Applies and that Traditional Marketing Theory is Passé
Traditional marketing theory is alive and thriving in the "new Internet economy." It can be used to do all the things it did so powerfully in the "old" economy, such as:
Creating a robust, thorough marketing plan (get started by reading our tutorial "What is Marketing, Anyhow?")
Branding your product or service (see our tutorial "The Basics of Branding")
Predicting the success or failure of new products or technologies (find an example in our article, "The Problem with E-Books")
Don't be fooled: marketing hasn't changed; it's just that authors who write about the "new rules of e-marketing" have scared enough people into buying books on the subject. How'd they do it? Traditional marketing! For more on this subject in general, see our debunking article, "The New E-Marketing Rules."
MISTAKE: Pushing Unwanted Products Or Technologies On Consumers
Technology companies use e-marketing quite a bit to promote their high-tech products. Tech companies are also particularly guilty of this error and have paid the price lately on Wall Street. Here's a hypothetical example of what happens: you have a bunch of really smart, tech-savvy people in a room, being paid to dream up new technologies. So maybe they invent a PDA device with a feature that allows PDA users to play music on the thing. The tech guys say "Dude, that's cool!" the company, trusting its smart tech guys, pushes the product into development, and then attempts to market the musical PDA to the public.
The problem is, the public never really wanted their PDAs to play music in the first place. They were busy trying to figure out how to enter basic information into the things. In the real world, Palm Pilot paid attention to that latter, unmet customer need, invented an easy-to-use shorthand language for PDA data entry, and sold millions of products to happy customers.
So how do you know what's going to be successful? Look around to see what sorts of problems customers have begun to solve for themselves - it doesn't have to be high-tech to be successful. For instance when people eat yogurt, they often pour a handful of Grapenuts into the container to add a little crunch to their lunch. Somebody at Yoplait was paying attention and came up with "Yo-Crunch." It's yogurt in a little container with a crunch-filled cap (granola, cookie bits, etc.) that you mix into the yogurt like a little crunchy-lunch kit. It's selling like gangbusters. Why? Because Yoplait filled an existing need, rather than inventing something 'cool' and pushing it onto an unsuspecting and uninterested public.
MISTAKE: Failing To Purge And Update Email Addresses
The Internet is a transient world. People often have multiple email addresses for work, home, and other uses, and they change these often. If you're going to e-market to people, invest in a service that helps you purge expired or inactive addresses. You worked hard to build your marketing message -- it's worth the investment to not send it into a black hole.
In fact, be careful of advertising in newsletters that don't tell you if they purge addresses. Some site that had 100,000 email addresses last year probably lost tens of thousands of them during the Internet demise. Ask if they've purged and updated their database, and if they won't tell you, move on.
MISTAKE: Writing Dreary Subject Lines For Your Email Messages And Newsletters
People get so much email these days that it's getting more and more difficult to get them to open all their messages. But if you're marketing over the Internet, you can't afford a trip right to the recycle bin, so it's worth the few extra minutes to dream up an attention-getting subject line.
For instance, if you're sending a newsletter to your customers every month, don't simply make the title "monthly newsletter." Instead, choose some juicy bit of text from inside the letter itself. Say you're writing about movie news, skip "Monthly Movie News" and instead opt for "An insider's slice of American Pie II: stories from the set."
MISTAKE: Generalizing From Personal Anecdotes And Opinions
This mistake occurs in just about every facet of marketing, but can run particularly rampant in e-marketing. Many of us in the business of marketing are particularly comfortable in and around the Internet. As a result, sometimes we assume we know what people think about the Internet, what they do there, and how they'll respond to our product and e-marketing message.
What some marketers may fail to recognize, however, is that they themselves are very likely not representative of the "common" consumer, either with respect to their product, or with respect to use of the Internet. The easiest form of "research" often takes place when the marketing team asks everyone's opinion around the table and then goes with the dominant response. The problem is, the people around the table already know about their product and have a vested interest in the type of marketing campaign pursued.
Don't assume that your target audience thinks like you do! They probably don't. Instead, consider investing in some small-scale research such as a phone survey, which can give you much more accurate information, and can be professionally designed and carried out at a reasonable cost. (See our resources page for companies that do this.)
Remember: a marketing message is not successful when everyone in the company likes it; it's successful when it helps promote the product. Research costs money, but paying up-front to know what your customers really think can be less costly than making bad assumptions and then back-tracking and correcting for them later.
MISTAKE: Writing Messages That Are Too Long
People don't like to read long messages. Keep yours as short as possible, while delivering the intended message. Watch this -- I'm going to practice what I preach by ending this article right here.
