Each day I get more than one hundred emails with titles like these:
What's Happening This Week at Shmegegge Meshuganah & Putz
The XYZ Corporation's Monthly Update, and
MBHSCBA Newsletter – November 12, 2012
They went directly into my deleted spam file right along with:
Ring In The Holidays With Deals Galore
Cobra Coverage for Everyone, and
Remove Moles and Skin Tags While You Sleep!
You know why I throw them all away? BECAUSE I DON'T CARE.
Now before you brand me as unnecessarily harsh, let me suggest that you don't care either. Fact is, no one cares.
Well, that's not entirely true. Someone does care… The people who send out those newsletters must care.
But no one else cares. Why? Because there's nothing in those newsletters for me.
How does my life improve by knowing whom Shmegegge and Meshuganah hired this week? How does my business get better by reading about the XYZ Corps' move into new markets? How does my family grow and prosper by knowing what MBHSCBA is doing?
They don't. And yours don't either.
But those are the things I care about and spend a lot of my time thinking about. And while your priorities may be slightly different, I'm willing to bet that those types of things are important to you too (as long as you substitute your life, business, and family for mine, I mean).
I read things that educate me, entertain me or enlighten me. And sometimes, when I'm really lucky, the things I read do all three at once. But I don't read self-serving claptrap that has no relevance in my life. I simply don't have the time, inclination or patience.
And I'll bet you don't either.
So why do our inboxes continue to get cluttered with so much junk? Because the people who send them out haven't stopped to think about what they're sending or who they're sending it to. More to the point, they don't think about why anyone would invest the time to read their mailings.
Instead, they hire or coerce someone in their office to manage their newsletter. And pretty quickly the task changes from creating compelling content to making sure that the document gets distributed on time. Ironically, even with this approach the schedules become compromised. After all, creating the first newsletter is fun. The second newsletter is three weeks late. There is no third newsletter.
So what's the solution? Quite simply, marketing information should be created with one thought in mind — making your mailers All About Them. That is, being single-minded about creating content that is highly relevant to your potential readers.
As I said, I read things that educate me, entertain me or enlighten me. So the benchmarks I use for this blog are the same — I want to make it useful, enjoyable, and valuable to you. And my Web metrics tell me almost immediately when I've been successful and captured my audiences' interest and when I've penned a digital dud.
Experience has taught me that when my blog is all about me, it doesn't resonate. But when it's All About You, it gets opened, read, and passed on to a larger and larger audience than I could ever reach on my own.
I bet this idea will work for you, too.