Troubleshooting a Failed Marketing Campaign

Campaigns Fail.  Shocking, right? It can be devastating when something you put days of work, and thousands of dollars into, has doesn’t perform. So, what do you do when you have a failure?

First, try your best to diagnose what happened. This isn’t always possible but below are some steps that might help you narrow in on the cause. Once you have an idea of what went wrong, you can figure out how to handle it.

Check all the campaign mechanics.  Ensure it really was a failure. 

1-Was tracking setup correctly? Could the leads be there, just not identified as being from this campaign.

2-Double check all the links, landing pages, phone numbers, etc to be sure they worked correctly. I had once had an eblast go out via a third party and while our test email was fine, the links didn’t work in the actual send. Luckily they caught the problem and resent the email.

3-A good place to double your success or failure is google analytics. If you use utm codes in your referring URLs or use unique landing pages, you should be able to see if you even got visits.  No visits (not even your test clicks) would indicated a mechanical problem

If mechanically everything worked, there are three options left. Channel, message, audience.

Channel

Diagnosing your channel is about looking at both the vendor you are using and the execution of it. Generally, my failures happen when I use a new vendor.  Occasionally a proven channel just doesn’t work any longer or maybe it never worked, you just didn’t realize it.

• If your campaign was an eblast, do you know if your email landed in the inbox or spam folder? I had a failure with a new vendor who did an eblast. We had one prior failure with them before so we were testing them one more time but this time, we used a proven message so we could determine if it was them. I couldn’t find the sample email in my gmail and it wasn’t until I went hunting in my google spam folder did I find the email.  There was a warning from Google that said this sender usually sends spam. I knew the second test was doomed to fail from that point on and it did.  Other things to watch for with outside eblasts are delivery rates, opt-in vs self-generated lists, time/day of the send, and how many other eblasts they send.
• If your campaign was advertising, there are a number of things that can go wrong. How many other ads are you competing with? Is there a strong call to action that is driving people to do what you want? Is the right audience seeing your ad? Do you have it up at the right times? Is someone else offering something very similar or have they done something similar recently so your audience has no reason to click on your ad? Are you sharing your message with the right audience or is it really a stretch to reach the right person. In the case of advertising, the problem usually lies with offer and audience.

Message

Diagnosing message problems are a bit harder.  Mostly because as overworked marketers, we wrote the message the first time and thought it was great. Diagnosing your own errors are painful.

• Have you used the same message before successfully and more than once? If so, message may not be the issue.
• Read through your message again with fresh eyes to see if there is anything obvious that may have caused the failure. Do you present value to the reader? Is the offer something that would actually be interesting to them? Does the wording make sense?
• Confirm your Calls to Action (CTA). Is there one and does it make sense?  I have seen many ads where a CTA was forgotten.  “Call us now. Click here. Download your copy. Fill out the form.”  It sounds so fundamental but if you didn’t tell people what to do, they won’t do anything.
• Imagine yourself as your target.  Then read through the message and think, would I respond to this?  This can be hard to do but may be where you go wrong.

Audience

The last thing to look at when you have a failure is your audience. This overlaps with many of the steps above but is probably worth looking at separately if you haven’t figured out the problem. Double check that the audience both makes sense and was selected properly.  If you used a list broker or outside vendor, be sure you got the right group. A consumer list targeting lawyers is very different than a business list targeting law firms. People with different jobs in the same company respond differently. If you built the list internally, did you select it correctly? Going to a show in Illinois and promoting it via email, don’t send the email to everyone in the country or your results will look abysmal. (Seriously, I have seen this happen.)

Now What

So, have you figured out what went wrong yet?  Hopefully you have a little idea but if not, no worries. Think of this as a learning moment.  So now what?

Is there anything you can do to salvage the situation?  Open your mind and think creatively.

If it is a vendor situation, address your concerns and see if they will do anything for you. Maybe an extra eblast or they can give you an ad for free. Maybe they can give you the information on the people who did open the email.

Do you have any information about the people who clicked your ad/email? If you have a marketing automation platform, you may be able to identify a few of them based on the cookies on your website and looking for people who visited a page. You can send an email to the people you can identify or pass them to sales to call.

If it was a mechanical problem (i.e. bad links), can you send an Ooops email to them? (Don’t be afraid to do this, oops emails generally get a better response than normal ones.)

Most times you can’t fix a failure, so don’t stress if you can’t, just keep moving and do better next time.

If you need to report on what happened, be honest. Present the facts. If you have diagnosed what happened, share it. State what you have learned and what you will do about it going forward.  (i.e. We won’t be using that vendor, we will use the vendor one more time but change the message).

Take a quick moment for some internal reflection. Do you have more failures than successes or is this a fluke? If you find you have more failures, I would suggest taking a few steps back and look at your campaign planning as a whole to see if you need to rethink your strategy. If it is just a fluke, think about what you learned and resolve to avoid it in the future.

In Conclusion

I always say “never give up on something the first time. When possible, give two to three attempts before declaring something a failure.”  If you have two failures in a row, it isn’t worth trying a third time but if you have one success and one failure, you need a tie breaker. I apply this to new vendors, channels and offers.

Know all marketers fail sometimes.  A better way to think of them is failed tests. Part of being a good marketer is doing continuous testing to find new ways to reach your audience and failure is a natural part of that testing process.

Are you struggling to diagnose a failed campaign?  Tell me what happened and let’s try to solve it together.