4 Fears Email Marketers Need to Conquer

When Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers came out in 2008, everyone was really taken by the “10,000 Hour Rule,” which said that it took roughly 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. At the time, I worked at the email marketing agency Smith-Harmon and we liked the concept so much that we created our own corollary: the “10,000 Email Rule.” That’s where you are considered an email expert once you’d created, analyzed, or reviewed 10,000 emails. Needless to say, that can take a lot less than 10,000 hours.

I remember the agency’s co-founder, Lisa Harmon, telling the team that email marketing was a relatively quick medium to master because:

• It’s high-volume
• It’s highly measurable
• It’s quickly measurable
• It has high returns
• It’s easily A/B tested
• Mistakes aren’t seen by all your subscribers and only haunt you until your next send, which…oh my god…you have to get ready for!

Essentially, email marketing is the epitome of a “fail fast” medium, because you can quickly and relatively painlessly experiment and learn from your tests and mistakes to achieve greater success. Or at least it should be.

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