Your Marketing Emails Reflect Your Corporate Culture
by Richard Barrett
Sounds just a little crass, doesn’t it? Corporate culture is a set of shared values that affect the behavior of the company. What’s that got to do with email marketing campaigns? But if your corporate culture drives the behavior of your employees, then marketing communications will be a reflection of your company culture.
Email Marketing Virtues
As an example, consider a set of “email marketing virtues.” These virtues dramatically improve the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. I’m not promoting these virtues as good behavior, merely effective behavior for email campaigns.
- Direct and Personal – Emails that come from a real person, as opposed to the “marketing department” or “customer service,” are much more effective in generating responses. On the recipient’s side the same is true. Email sent to an individual by name, “Dear David Persig,” will generate a better response than that same email sent to “Dear Director.”
- Honest – How often have you received an email promoting an e-book or a webinar claiming that “supplies are limited,” when, in fact, they are not. Once the email sender loses your trust, their company ends up in your mental spam bucket. Good email campaigns are honest not because it’s an honorable virtue, but because deception just doesn’t work as well.
- Patient and Persistent – Your customer does not think about your company every day. In fact, it may be a sign of trouble if your customer is thinking about you too much. You want to be a reliable, dependable supplier, always there when your customer does need you. In the same way, an email marketing campaign should be present in the in-box at the moment the prospect needs help. Patience and persistence in email marketing produce consistently higher results than erratic campaigns.
- Polite and Respectful – Do the email communications respect the prospect’s time? Are they short, direct, and clear? Timeworn marketing phrases such as “free,” “limited time,” “act now” and “while supplies last” demonstrate a lack of respect
Corporate Culture Drives Employee Actions
If the company culture demonstrates respect for individuals, then the marketing manager will reflect respect of customers and prospects in the email communications.
If the corporate culture truly values honesty and integrity, the marketing manager demonstrates that integrity in email communications to prospects.
If the corporate culture values long-term results over “quick hits,” then the marketing manager can take the time to build long-term relationships with prospects, patiently and persistently.
To discover your corporate culture just read your marketing communications.
If they sound like a late-night TV infomercial, don’t change the people, change the culture.
