Learning Curves!

It’s only easy when you know what you are doing!

However intuitive people make their products, there is still a learning curve.

I want to send an email promotion to past guests of mine at my holiday cottages in Snowdonia. You know the sort of thing – “Thanks for coming. It’s now winter. Here’s a special offer.”

Sounds simple enough. But it’s not!

I’ve spent all morning, and a chunk of yesterday designing an email in the industry-leading MailChimp software.

Now I’ve never used MailChimp before, but buoyed by assurances that it is intuitive (it is, after all the product of a company aptly named ‘Intuit’) I set about composing my first campaign.

I’m about seven hours in and I have an email that looks great.

I’ve matched the colours to my corporate brand and set out what I think is a pretty irresistible offer. I’ve managed to personalise it, added nice looking images and included a big button so recipients can “BOOK NOW!”

My email list isn’t huge. I’ve only been building it for a few months, so I’ve got less than 50 recipients. I could have hand written each one of them a personalised card, stamped it and posted them out in less time than it has taken me to set up the MailChimp campaign. But (in a marshmallow test-passing way) I’m viewing this as an investment now to reap rewards in the future.

Before pressing the button on the live campaign I figured it wise to test everything with a cut down list of trusted recipients. So I pressed the button and waited for the limited number of friends and family to reply with “Wow! How professional!”

Silence.

Every one had gone straight into SPAM!

Back to square one.