After interviewing Maddie Grant back in May, I wrote a post that asked, “Are best-practices evil?”
I was prompted to ask the question because Maddie and her co-author Jamie Notter had said as much in their book, Humanize. I return to the subject once more because in the new book, The Rebel’s Guide to Email Marketing, co-authors DJ Waldow and Jason Falls, my guests on this week’s episode of Marketing Smarts, basically take the same position.
Well, not quite the same. DJ and Jason don’t say that best-practices are evil. They believe, instead, that they—like the mythical Medusa, chimera, and minotaur—do not exist.
The Best Answer Is ‘It Depends’
“The only best-practice that I think we would agree on,” Jason told me, “after researching and talking to companies and writing this
book, is that there are no best-practices.” (To be fair, Jason did walk that back a little by adding “other than the massive one that you should consider email marketing.”)
The problem is that “best-practices” are, in the end, little more than general guidelines. When you are deciding which tactics to pursue in your specific situation, Jason emphasizes, “The decision tree… is always going to be different for every business.”
What is “best” will depend on what you are actually trying to accomplish given your actual goals, your actual audience, and your actual resources. Whenever you ask about the “most effective subject lines” or the “best way to grow your list, the “best” answer is, “It depends.”
Tell Me What to Do!
Naturally, that’s a rather unpopular and less than satisfying response. Why? Because, as DJ and Jason write in their book, “Sometimes you just want to be told what to do. You want the case study that corroborates what you believe to be true. You want the easy answer. You want to just hit the easy button and make it all work out just fine.”
We want to be told what to do not because we’re lazy (though some of us might be) but because we don’t always know what to do. And in most cases, when we have to do something (which we may not have done before)—”We need to blast our list to make sure the phones start ringing!”—it needs to happen immediately and we don’t really have time to devise clever tests of different approaches. We just want to do “what works.”
Figuring Out What Works
To really figure out what works, you need to improvise, experiment and test. Unfortunately, we might not have time to do that and, even if we did, we might not know exactly how to test things or even what to test.
So, we rely on best-practices assuming that, “If this worked for someone else, maybe even a lot of someone elses, then chances are it will work for me.” This is not an absolutely foolish assumption. There are some general rules of what NOT to do in most marketing scenarios (Don’t use the F-word in your subject line; don’t say that your competitor’s product is cheaper and better, etc.) and there are some general rules of human psychology upon which you can rely (people like free stuff, people don’t like to “miss out” so creating “limited time offers” can motivate action, etc.).
Nevertheless, innovation doesn’t come from copying others. Simply believing that something won’t work or is off the table without testing whether it would work in your circumstances means that, by following best-practices, you could actually be missing a lot of valuable opportunities.
Marketing Myths
Boldly asserting that “There are no best-practices,” while provocative, is not entirely. There are certainly things called “best-practices” (just Google it!) and, in point of fact, some tactics do statistically perform better than others in most circumstances. And, frankly, when you’re new at something, following best practices is absolutely reasonable.
Still, I think we need to treat best-practices as the myths of old. No one today believes that Medusa or the minotaur actually existed, but in the tales woven around them, we can still divine lessons from them (“Sometimes an indirect strategy will be more effective,” “Don’t let your pride be your undoing,” etc.) that can help us organize our lives and overcome its challenges.
Treating best-practices as myths, however, requires that we also view them with a healthy skepticism. Such skepticism will first inspire you to demand proof that this or that practice really is the best. Moreover, a skeptical approach should encourage you try best-practices out for yourself and see what happens. In doing so, ideally, you will learn more about the thing that really matters most: what works for you, your company and your customers.
Finally, and best of all, a skeptical approach will goad you on to try new things and conduct your own experiments. By doing so who knows what you’ll discover? Maybe another best-practice (or at least a new myth)!
If you’d like to hear my entire conversation with DJ and Jason, you can listen here or download the mp3 and listen at your leisure. Of course, you can also subscribe to Marketing Smarts via RSS or in iTunes and never miss an episode!
SPECIAL NOTE: Also, DJ will be appearing at our B2B Forum, October 3-5. Use the code SMARTB2B when you register, and save $200!
(Photo courtesy of Bigstock: God of War)
