Set & Meet Expectations

I believe it was veteran direct marketer Ernan Roman who I heard say at a marketing conference several years ago that one of the keys to a successful email campaign was to first set the expectations of your customer and then meet them. That statement has stuck with me ever since as a foundational principal.

Setting expectations means managing your opt-in process so that the customer knows what they are signing up for and how often you will send it. If your offerings are diverse, then give your customer options for selecting the type of information they want to receive. Do they want your discount offers, product announcements, whitepapers or all of the above? Do they want it daily, weekly or monthly?

Many of the small organizations we have worked with don’t have the technological or human capacity to implement an email program that is quite that complicated. It doesn’t remove the burden to clearly let the customer know what they are signing up for.

Then comes the really hard part for marketers – meet those expectations. There seems to be no end to the pressure on marketers to send an email blast every time a last minute push is needed or some hot new thing comes up just after the regularly scheduled email has gone out and it just can’t wait until the next one. After all – it doesn’t cost much to send out an email – right? Just remember that the cost is not always financial. If you violate your customers expectations too often you cross the line into spam and could loose that customer.

Sundeep Kapur recently wrote an article on ClickZ called 5 Tips to Empower Your Email Marketing. All five are excellent tips. Some of them are a little more out of reach for some of the smaller clients we have worked with. For example – A/B testing your subject line when you have a very small list is impractical and might not give good results.

The final tip in the article though is right in line with “Set & Meet Expectations.” In this case Mr. Kapur asks “Does your customer trust you?” Setting and meeting expectations builds trust and is something every marketer can do.