Do you receive the marketing emails your company sends out?
Do you open them, look at the design through the eyes of your customers, check the offers and the links, even place the occasional order or put in a help request?
If you don’t, you should.
You may be thinking that you pay other people to do that—and you probably do. You should be able to trust those people to do a good job and implement the marketing plan you approved.
But that doesn’t relieve you (and by “you,” I mean the company owner and/or senior management team) of the responsibility for making sure your system is working as it should.
Action advice:
• Set up several email accounts on different systems using fictitious names your team won’t recognize and subscribe to every email list your company maintains.
• Open every email and at least skim it. Is the design user-friendly? Is the style and tone appropriate? Is the information accurate? Is it fresh and creative or has your team resorted to tired, overused tricks and gimmicks?
• Regularly click through all of the links to make sure they work and, if your messages include sales offers, periodically place an order. You may not want to do this with every email, but do it with enough that you can be sure of the overall quality of your campaigns.
• Provide appropriate feedback to the folks doing the work.
Are you thinking you don’t have time to do that? Really? The truth is you don’t have time not to. Which is better—spend a few minutes up front making sure things are being done right or spend days or weeks and lots of money correcting mistakes after the fact?
You can certainly delegate the work and even a portion of the responsibility. But the proverbial buck stops with you, and you can't afford to not know what your company is sending out.
I’ve had clients who rarely checked my work before it was published. While I was flattered at the degree of trust they placed in me and I never betrayed that trust, I was frustrated by their disregard for the impact the content I created had on their company. And I was embarrassed for them when they would be asked about something they had ignored and couldn't answer the question.
If you don’t care about the impression you make on every front, why should the people who work for you?
Jacquelyn's latest book is Christian Business Almanac: The Ultimate Daily Guide for Kingdom-Driven Entrepreneurs and Leaders.
She is the author of the nonfiction books Simple Facts About Self-Publishing (Second Edition), Words to Work By: 31 devotions for the workplace based on the Book of Proverbs and Finding Joy in the Morning: You can make it through the night as well as the novel Choices (A Joyful Cup Story). With her husband, she is the co-creator of several coloring books for adults and the novelty My Book About series.
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