Email Marketing Best Practices: Are Your Customers Dogs or Cats?

Are Your Customers Like Cats? Ignoring You? Email Marketing Best Practices Will Help!

Whether you’re a dog person or a cat person, you know the difference. As the saying goes, “Dogs have owners; cats have staff.”

Dogs love you no matter what. Dogs never hold a grudge. They forgive everything. They are miserable when you leave and ecstatic when you return. They think you walk on water and control the heavens and are the greatest creature to ever live. Ever. Dogs adore you.

Cats could not care less about you. They not only ignore you. They disdain you. The don’t care when you leave. They don’t care when you return. They don’t care. Period.

Now, I suspect we all want to believe the people who get our email marketing messages are like dogs. We want to believe that they adore us and can’t wait to hear from us, that we can do no wrong in their eyes.

But the truth is, those folks on our in-house email lists are more likely to be like cats. They really don’t care. We are an annoyance when we show up in the inbox. They never miss us or pine for us.

And they are easily pissed. Trust me, if cats could report email marketers as spam, we’d have a heck of a lot more blacklisting and email deliverability problems to deal with!

Does that mean all is hopeless? That our customers are cats, not dogs? Nope. It just means we work harder. As any cat owner knows, they can be won over…slowly and persistently, yet carefully. With treats and toys, affection and adoration, we can convince cats that we as human beings might just serve a purpose and have some value. In short, we woo them.

Same with your subscribers, prospects and customers. If we realize they aren’t like dogs but view our email marketing with the same skepticism of a cat, we will work harder. What does that look like? Targeted, relevant, timely, appropriate, customer-first type email marketing.

That part you can figure out, I know. The first step is changing your point of view and then your approach. Then the email marketing best practices of relevancy will click into place.