You might be surprised at the results.

1.  Your email schedule slips.  You put off sending your newsletter because things come up.  You don’t send your promo because it got busy.

2.  You keep searching for the perfect email.  You wait and wait for more information or the perfect article or the latest data.  In the meantime your email doesn’t get sent.

3.  You’re too unorganized.  You have too many things crossing your desk.  Too many tasks pulling on your time and you start and email campaign, but don’t finish it.  Or you do get one out the door but don’t go back and check results.  Did it work?  Did it bomb?

4.  You have a million ideas for emails.  But you never get around to picking one and following through.  New ideas come to you often and your list of cool things to try keeps building.

5.  Your goals are a moving target.  Do you want to use email to increase customer loyalty?  Improve sales?  Generate leads?  Support your brand?  You can’t make one email do all those things.  Set some goals and stick to them.

6.  You have half finished emails sitting in your queue.  Sometimes something comes up.  An image isn’t ready, your landing page is broken, you need your shopping cart to take a promo code.  And you wait on someone, meanwhile the email doesn’t go out.

7.  You tell your team about your great email campaigns you’re working on.  But again, you’re in love with the idea of emails but hitting the send button eludes you.  Take a deep breath and take a stand.

8.  You are a perfectionist.  You send a test message.  You wait.  You proof it.  You send another test.  You’re terrified a typo gets out or a broken link is missed.  Even an email with something wrong with it trumps an email never sent. I have seen some big errors that turned into something positive as a result.  (my favorite is a creative director whos rant went to REPLY ALL list and instead of getting fired it turned into a Superbowl spot)

9.  You don’t have any checklists.  You keep making the same mistakes over and over.  This one is more common than you think.

10.  You think everyone is making a killing with their emails and you aren’t.  In reality, email marketing is hard work.  Full of trial and error, testing, false starts and outright blunders.  Press on and you’ll learn how to make email work for you.

We did.  After 2,500 campaigns over 5 years, we know what works and what likely won’t work.  Read our blog post on when to call in an email marketing consultant.