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Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog.
Hello!
This week’s issue is brought to you by Q-Tip and his track Breath and Stop from 2000; why? Because I’ve been thinking about this line:
“We gonna satisfy the urge and discover the need”
Since starting a new fractional role with a client, I have been getting a lot of unsolicited sales emails. It took no time at all for a brand new email address to make it onto god knows how many lists.
Some of it is lazy mass mail hoping for a 0.01% return with very little craft, but I admit some of them have good game when it comes to the subject line, and I end up opening before I discover the offer is way off what I’m interested in or actually need.
They satisfied the urge (to open the email), but they hadn’t discovered the need.
You may have seen on LinkedIn I shared a particularly poorly targeted email that sent me an offer for fractional CMO services to the email address my client had given me. Guess what I am providing this client? Fractional CMO services.
Discovering the need (or in this case lack of it) would be super simple, it’s written in on my LinkedIn profile.
Of course, we both know that it would have been super simple to find out if it had been a personal outreach, but this chap was probably just cranking open the spam-o-maker bomb bay doors at 30 thousand feet to spread this message across a bought list of a billion email addresses that are vaguely in the target group.
As I sat down to write this, framed as a rant against unsolicited email, it struck me that “satisfy the urge and discover the need” is actually a more interesting take on the act of marketing than a craftily worded subject line.
It tugs at the long and short of B2B marketing, especially if you are in an emerging market.
You need to satisfy the short-term urge, both your business's urge in terms of needing awareness and contacts and do this with tactics like a clever email subject line that satisfies the urge of the audience.
The problem, which I think afflicts email marketing (and when we focus too much on any vanity metric), is that the metric measures our ability to satisfy the urge (the open rate); the true metric is when you discover the need.
So, yeah, this week, let’s follow the advice of the marketing genius that is Jonathan William Davis AKA Kamaal Ibn John Fareed AKA Q-Tip and breath and stop.
“We gonna satisfy the urge and discover the need”
Enjoy your week!
Cheers!
Ian
Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO
Say hello, reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn or my personal website.
On the podcast this week
Street Knowledge
Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working
Classic early 2000’s Hip Hop for your Monday Mojo pleasure….