By Tom Wozniak, Head of Marketing – published on OnlyInfluencers on 6/28/22

In life, we all use conventional wisdom (CW) on a regular basis. We come across it in every facet of our lives.

“If the stove gas burner doesn’t light the first time, wait a few seconds for the gas to dissipate before trying again.”

“Kids should do homework every night.”

“It’s harder to find a new customer than retain an existing one.”

We often use these bits of wisdom as a shortcut when making decisions. They help narrow down our options or give us some initial direction. That makes conventional wisdom pretty useful in preventing us from getting bogged down in over-analyzing everything. 

However, relying too much on conventional wisdom can lead to a lack of innovation and even outright mistakes. Over time, conventional wisdom has a habit of becoming inaccurate, either because it becomes out-of-date or possibly ignores better options that might be harder to accomplish. Once upon a time, it was conventional wisdom that the earth was flat or that cigarettes had no adverse impacts on our health. So, it’s pretty clear that an overreliance on it can become a bad habit.

As email marketers, we have 40+ years of collected conventional wisdom and best practices to help guide us in creating successful campaigns. But, what if some of that wisdom is actually holding us back from innovating or simply testing the boundaries of the channel? What if these shortcuts are keeping us from real success?

Let’s look at 5 pieces of email marketing conventional wisdom that it might be time to question before using it as a definitive guide to your decision-making.

1. Email marketing delivers an ROI of 42x… or 36x… or 90x

Every email marketer has seen at least one benchmark for email marketing campaign ROI over the years (and probably several). The one that seems to come up most often these days is 36x or $36 for every $1 spent. The first ROI benchmark that I remember seeing years ago came from the DMA at 42x. This number was still being quoted by the DMA as recently as 2019. More recently, I’ve seen a 90x return number quoted from one company. So, conventional wisdom would say that one of these numbers should be your baseline for measuring the success of any email campaign.

Read the rest at OnlyInfluencers.

Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications for OPTIZMO Technologies.