Are Your E-mails Worthless?

One of our business associates called me this morning asking me why I had not responded to his request for more information about our consulting services.

He was very angry – and justifiably so. After all, if we pride ourselves in teaching others how to become more customer-oriented, it doesn’t reflect well on us if we don’t practice what we preach.

The problem was that I had never received his e-mail.

After giving him a call, I quickly diagnosed what the problem was, the dreaded 4 letter word: SPAM.

When I explained the situation to him, his first reaction was disbelief. After all, his e-mail did not contain any verbiage that would jump out at as being SPAM. There was not any mention of a special offer on Viagra, or a free giveaway down at the local shopping mall. This is what jumps to mind when the word SPAM is mentioned. Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There is an association whose sole purpose it is to keep e-mail boxes free of SPAM and the rules and regulations that they use to determine what is and what isn’t SPAM vary on a continuous basis. The list of words that are considered to be SPAM is not static either. At a recent marketing conference I attended, Infusionsoft presented the current list of words that trigger most SPAM filters.

Upon hearing the description of the e-mail the gentleman sent me earlier, the word opportunity was used three times in the e-mail and once in the subject line. This e-mail is screaming sales pitch to the average e-mail server.

But as I explained to him, you can fix this issue and it still may not necessarily fix the problem.

This is because in order for your e-mail to be delivered to its recipient it has to go through an extremely complex process. First, your e-mail is analyzed on the way out by your e-mail client. Next, the e-mail is analyzed by the recipient’s e-mail client. And here’s the worst part – – the different e-mail services (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook) all have different methods for determining whether or not an e-mail is “ok” or not. So if you are sending the same e-mail to multiple people there is a chance that one person received it while another did not.

So why is this all important?

You can spend all the time (and money) in the world to write the best e-mails in order to pitch potential prospects, but in the end if you don’t do sufficient testing to make sure that your e-mails are being delivered then you might as well start flushing money down the toilet.

Whenever we send out e-mails to multiple clients or prospects, we always run a number of tests before we send out the final version.

Even then, after all of these steps, 100% e-mail deliverability is not assured; however, the number is much higher, and a higher number means a higher chance of getting the sale. Isn’t that why you are in business?

If you have any questions in reference to this blog posting you can reach me at (703) 591-2490 or brad@daveyoho.com.