So often we are talking about the issue of email marketing strategy when referring to somewhat larger scale email blasts to an organization’s contact list. But, email strategy extends beyond the corporate world and can have an impact in places you least expect.

Just yesterday I saw this scenario unfold and I thought it was worth highlighting…

A very good friend is running an American Idol pool this year (which I’m excited about!). He sent out an email to about 20 of our close friends explaining the format to them (you basically pick a team of 4 who you think will last the longest and then each week you submit who you think will be eliminated), the various deadlines, and a request to forward the email to other people who may be interested in joining.

It is this last objective that I am going to focus on.

It makes sense that he suggested that people forward the message to their friends, families, co-workers, etc. After all, the more people who join the pool, the bigger the prize. This request to forward the email is actually a ‘strong call to action’ because it clearly tells the recipient what to do next.

The problem was that my friend accidentally forgot to put the cost of joining the pool. So, anyone who received the forwarded email (and who hadn’t spoken to him directly in the past to know the cost) would be left wondering how much it costs. Is it $1000, $100, $10, etc? This is fundamentally one of the most information pieces of information someone would need when deciding whether they want to join or not and it was left out. This causes a big communication breakdown and ultimately a roadblock for more people to signup.

Now what happens is anyone who received the forwarded email has to either respond to the person who forwarded it and ask a follow-up question or respond directly to the person running it (who smartly put their email address in the message) to get more information. Since people will often chose the least laboring approach, many may just dismiss the email and therefore not join the pool (which is opposite of the original desired outcome), even though if it included all the information they may have joined.

This really does serve as a great example of how leaving out the smallest detail can really cause one of your primary email objectives to fail.

Once I brought this to his attention, he sent out a follow-up email the next day. The follow-up email had the price in it, but did not include a copy of the original message or a re-cap of what was said previously. This is a whole other issue because now anyone who gets this follow-up email has two messages: One with all the core information and one with the price. Having two messages that they need to pair together on their own will severely hurt results because now you are asking the recipient to do extra work in order to take your desired action.

What he really needed to do was send out a follow-up email addressing the information he left out, but include the original message or re-state all the information. This way the recipient has everything laid out in one organized email that answers all their questions.

Even though this year’s American Idol pool will not be as big because of a serious flaw in the email strategy that will hurt registrations, I’m still excited about it!