What Can the FIFA World Cup 2014 Teach You about Email Marketing?

For the past month the entire world was consumed with what is considered one of the biggest global events – the World Cup, which was held in Brazil. And while there was plenty of intrigue and excitement in the cup itself, there were a lot of lessons that could be applied by email marketers. So here are some of the biggest takeaways from the 2014 FIFA World Cup that are very useful to anyone doing email campaigns:

Choose Your Tactics Accordingly

In the World Cup, the teams that managed to choose the best tactics to take advantage of the opponents’ weaknesses saw the most success – so that’s exactly what you should be aiming at with every email marketing campaign. 

Remember, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to reaching different groups of people – always try to find out as much information as possible about every prospect group in your list and then create different approaches to each of them. The better you manage to reach the individual person, the more chance you have to actually win him over and gain his trust. 

Nobody wants to feel like they’re getting the same vague generalized email that thousands of others do – if you can show the person receiving your emails that you know something about him and can show that you have a solution to his specific problem, he will be much more likely to listen.

This can be accomplished by different subscription methods or by simply asking – you’d be surprised how willing people are to share what their problems are and what they want. 

Track Your Results

There are hundreds of countries that fight for a spot in the World Cup, yet only 32 got the opportunity to play in the stadiums of Brazil and compete for the ultimate prize in football. And those teams did not get there by taking guesses – it took years or even decades of careful study and preparation to structure a player development system which yields successful results.

Most marketers could learn a lot from this – edging out your competition and establishing a presence in the market requires constant tweaking of each part of the campaign, and especially email marketing. 

After all, once you have someone interested in your services, you can’t allow yourself to make many mistakes – so you have to quickly learn from the ones that do happen and track everything that’s working, so you can build on that. 

It Won’t Always Be Perfect

You have probably heard how many problems Brazil encountered in their preparation for hosting the World Cup – protests across the country, spending scandals, budget issues, even the stadiums’ weren’t built till the last days before the opening.

Still, in the end, the World Cup was a relative success and will be remembered as one of the best football events ever organized.

So for an online marketing agency,the main lesson would be to not worry too much about achieving perfection – human error is unavoidable and there will be screw-ups, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be corrected or simply lived-through. It’s much better to have an imperfect job done than a perfect job never finished. 

Summing it up, the World Cup took over millions of peoples’ lives over the past month, but some of the aspects of the game can be a valuable lesson to any online marketing agency. Choosing the right tactics in each situation, tracking your results to ensure progress and not getting stuck on perfectionism are all essential steps for anyone who wants to have success online. 

Author Bio:

Shayne Moore is a Director at a leading email marketing agency, specialising in online marketing and web design services. Shayne’s passionate about digital marketing and loves to share his creative ideas on the latest design trends. You can know more about him on Linkedin.

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