head·wind
/ˈhedˌwind/
: a force of influence that inhibits progress
No shame to the person who sent it (there’s a learning in it for all of us and that’s what the Headwind series is all about), but I subscribe to a variety of email lists that share businesses for sale in the Atlanta area and this was the body of a recent email announcing a juice bar listing.
More specifically, this was the image chosen for that email.
Having worked closely with a business brokerage for a short period of time, you can almost be certain that it was the broker assigned to this deal that built the listing but who it was doesn’t matter. It’s the marketing principle that it ignores that is the real message.
More on that in a minute.
Thinking through the steps, after reviewing financial performance they carefully valued the business and aligned on their listing price with the seller. Needing a brief bit of information about the business it seems they looked to the Google Business Profile to grab a summary. And the last thing would be filling in the white space of the listing with an image.
Surely there were plenty of chances for this image to be questioned by the person listing it as to whether it was the marqui image they wanted or not: as the image was uploaded into the system, as it was shown in the preview before activating the listing, as it was shown in the order of other images (and stood out as one of the more boring ones)...see appendix.
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
The lesson in this is that you can spend hours in any campaign or activation on the pieces that feel most important, but for one reason or another miss the mark entirely on your first impression. The moment you rely on most to inspire action from your subscribers (if we keep the focus on email marketing). You’ve done the work to get that person in your database and now you are expected to send them something of value and inspire the next best action that keeps them moving forward on their customer journey. Situations like this in busy organizations are more often than not followed by the line, “We just needed to get it out."
That’s not a good reason for sending an email.
Because celebratory moments of “Email sent!” are followed (literally minutes later) by conversations with the client or other departments about “How is it performing?”
You can never be too busy to not do the little things in marketing well.
Making a great first impression is one of them. I’d bet my life savings on a better click through rate for an email that includes a beautiful, colorful image of a smoothie or an exterior shot of the business and I don’t think many people would argue that.
Email marketing and having access to someone’s inbox is a privilege and you have to earn the right with every email. It’s not that every email needs to be overengineered, but you must always do the little things well.
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