Dale Carnegie summed up how to keep audiences engaged with this succinct quote, “Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.”
Now that we’re clear on that, and that you’ve read the headline for this blog post, I guess my next step is to answer it.
So, where does the magic happen? Outside of our comfort zone. In fact, way out.
A few years ago, I was at a conference and the presenter wanted to imbue this principle into our minds, so she had a diagram up on the big screen with a bubble on the lower left quadrant; it was titled your comfort zone. This is where you do your ordinary things—both good and bad—out of rote. Then way up on the opposite end of the screen was another circle titled, where the magic happens.
Moving from Point A to B
Of course, there’s no clear path to the magic.
The only thing that is obvious is that you have to leave the comfort zone and try new things. Now, mathematicians have taught that a straight line is the quickest route to go from point A to point B, but marketing is not entirely like math.
Sure, there are numbers and data analysis that can aid in decision making; however, marketing has emotion and that is not mathematical. So even if you could just walk over to the magic, you have to plan your route.
For me, this means opening up to the world and giving my opinions. Am I nervous? Totally. Are my assumptions and analysis correct for every situation? Certainly not, but I believe that my acumen, knowledge, and experience can help your marketing efforts, especially on the email marketing front.
Here’s What I’m Going to Discuss
Some of the topics I weigh in on are “surveying without surveys,” “my 3 favorite types of emails,” and “do A/B subject line split tests end with the open rate?” I’ve developed these ideas in over a decade worth of hands-on experience in email marketing and have lectured on the topic too.
But going back to where the magic happens (and implementing the Dale Carnegie method), I want to contend that the magic happens in your click, conversion, and churn rates. And like magicians never reveal their secrets, so too, these numbers don’t scream out how and why they performed the way they did.
We certainly look high and low when things are not working for us, but what about when they do go right? I believe that we must break the norm, step out of the comfort zone and be in “panic mode” particularly when campaigns go through the roof! Let me expound on that: if you had a campaign that performed exceedingly well today, then you should stop everything and have an urgent powwow meeting with your team. Of course, there
