Renee's marketing emails aren't working because they're irrelevant, too long, and sent at the wrong time. Ryan Dohrn says mass email still works if you target tightly, schedule for 2:15 PM in each recipient's time zone, and pair it with phone calls. If open rates drop below 17%, change the content, timing, or sender.
Hey friends, Ryan Dohrn here answering your listener questions. Thanks for sending them in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. I love these listener questions. It's great. All right. Uh, we've got a question here. Renee from Florida. Uh, hey Ryan, my marketing department insists on mass emails and they seem to not be working anymore. Is it a COVID thing or is it just a thing? Great question, Renee, uh, from Florida. Here is— I'd like to give you my opinion, and you're welcome to place comments, friends, because I'm going to get some hate mail for this from all my marketing friends that are out there. All right, it's not that mass email marketing doesn't work. I just find that a lot of marketers anymore are getting a little bit lazy in the way that we're writing these. We're not highly relevant, they're way too long, they're not timed correctly, and that type of thing. I think people have become overwhelmed as we sell here in our post-pandemic selling world. People become overwhelmed, their inboxes are really, really full. So I do like mass emails, I just feel like they need to be highly relevant, highly focused, really, really targeted. Like for example, if you're sending out a mass email to people in various time zones, rather than just have it send at one specific time, have it hit in the time zone at a time where you're going to get the best open rate. Like for example, let's just say every time I send out an email, which does happen, I get a good response at 2:15 PM. Well, Why not use my email service provider, if you're using one that does this, to time zone separate this out? If I know 2:15 is good and I know I'm going to get a good response, I want it to hit at 2:15 in every time zone. And if your email service provider can't do that, then maybe you need a new email service provider. What I would tell you though is that in the outside sales business where I mostly live, I do some inside sales too, I can't rely on mass emails to bring in that business. I've got to get out there and rattle trees, shake trees. I've got to get out there and talk to people. I've got to be picking up that phone. So it's not that mass emails are ineffective. I have just found that we might need to tweak on those and think about them a little bit, maybe change up when they're sent, how they're sent, who's sending them, who they're coming from. So if they're dropping in effectiveness below like 17%, which is moderately standard for sales emails, just friends, just rethink it. And I'm not hating on my marketing friends out there. I'm just asking us all to kind of rethink this, recalibrate, and reset as we look to be selling here in a post-pandemic sales world. So Renee from Florida, thanks so much for your question sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. Hey friends, love to speak at your upcoming sales conference, train your teams virtually. Head over to ryandohrn.com. Happy to give you a quote on that. And just remember, friends, if sales was easy, everybody would do it. Doing it. And they're not. We're not crazy, friends. We are the chosen few, chosen to get out on the streets and sell the various products and services that our bosses want us to sell and is going to feed our family for a lifetime. All right. We'll see you next week for more listener questions. Take care.
