A few years ago I was asked to do a webinar on “advanced” email marketing.

I duly prepared all sort of slides on doing advanced segmentation and event-triggered email that sent different things to different people based on what they'd shown an interest in and how much they'd engaged so far.

5 minutes in to the webinar I asked the audience what their experience level with email marketing was: were they veterans, had a bit of experience, had only just started or hadn't started at all.

As the answers came in I realised the webinar was pitched at completely the wong level.

About 80% of the audience said they either hadn't started with email marketing or had only just got going.

All my “advanced” material was going to be meaningless to them.

So we switched back to talking about the basics of building an email list, writing valuable emails and getting them opened and read. Thankfully we figured it out right at the start and were able to deliver a webinar the audience loved.

I was lucky that in that case I was able to get immediate feedback to let me course-correct. More often than not we just plough on with something that isn't actually right.

When I did a survey a few months ago asking what you'd like me to write about in these emails the answers were very different to what I'd expected (and what the results have been before).

How certain are you that your marketing is hitting all the right spots for your ideal clients?

Have you asked them?

The world has changed a lot in the last 12 months and if you haven't had direct feedback about what your people now value there's a good chance you're getting it wrong.