Keep a close eye on your champions

The best way to tell if your inbound strategy has staying power is to keep a close eye on the number of champions you have.

There are a couple of assumptions in that sentence, so I’m going to lay them out.

1. I’m assuming your inbound strategy is legit. One of the ways you can tell it’s legit is that you’ve got a documented and agreed-upon methodology for moving and converting your leads into customers and then your customers on to champions.
2. The end goal of your inbound strategy is about filling your customer with delight.

Delighted customers tell their friends and relatives. Delighted customers come back and become brand champions. Brand champions aren’t born, they’re made. By you.

When you continue the relationship with your customers beyond the sale by delighting them with frictionless interactions, amazing tricks and tips, and even clever packaging, you grow champions.

And that's a good thing. When people love your brand, they're loyal, they're advoactes, and they come back again and again. When you're growing champions -- when the the trend line in the "delight" phase of your strategy is upward-- you're doing it right.

But what happens when it all goes wrong?

But if you're not growing champions, what then? Or worse, what happens when your champions are fleeing?

Here's the best advice I can offer you: It's not because your champions are doing something wrong.

Just sending happy little emails

Early on in my career, I was something of a Bob Ross of email marketers. Don't get me wrong, I love Bob Ross, but, just like how he would sometimes paint "Happy Little Clouds," sometimes, I was just sending "Happy Little Emails."

Like Ross' little clouds, my emails were fluffy and pretty and made me and my bosses feel good. At the end of the day we made little reports we could show off. We were so proud.

Don't get me wrong; I looked at the analytics-- in all cases, I had a pretty respectable readerships and click through rate-- but what I didn't have was any kind of inbound or follow-through marketing strategy.

And that's where the real power lies in email marketing, right? I mean, I know I'm preaching to the choir here. None of you would ever send out a huge smash of emails to everyone on your list just because.

Of course not. That would be crazy.

The problem is, people do just that all the time. If you've ever had your email address fed into the spam machine by a group of angry script kiddies (long story) you know just how large of a problem this is.

Five ways to be a better email marketer

So what are responsible inbound marketers to do? Here are five suggestions for how we can be better stewards of our email marketing efforts.

1. Don't buy Lists. Ever. And refuse to work with those who do.
2. Understand how email works. Not just server to server, but understand the peering and reputation systems at play behind the scenes.
3. Segment, Segment, Segment. Don't send email to people who don't want it. People who already bought your product probably won't want to see that email that tells them you're having a sale on the thing they just paid full price for.
4. Understand your audience Not just to the demographics of your audience, but understand all the ways your audience wants to interact with you, and what your unique value proposition is to them. If you don't have audience personas written down somewhere, you're probably not really marketing.
5. Take a class or get a certification. You probably don't know as much about this as you think you do, and this stuff is changing all the time.