You’ve done the 26 miles. Make sure you do the 365 yards.

A marathon is often thought to be 26 miles long. If you’ve ever run one, you’ll know it’s a little bit longer than that. 385 yards longer*. You can run 26 miles and you haven’t completed the marathon. You’ve done all the hard work, but you don’t get the space blanket, the medal, or the sponsorship money.

This site is about marketing, not marathons, but the message is the same. Here’s the story that prompted me to write this post…

Recently, I received an (unsolicited) email from a printers. It was promoting small quantities of self adhesive labels at trade prices, and quick turnarounds. As luck would have it, for the printers, the stars were aligned. I was, at that exact moment, in the market for just such a thing!

The printers had done all the hard 26 miles. They’d developed their offer. They had a brand. They’d built a database of potential customers. They’d put an email campaign together. They’d got that email to somebody that was interested in their product. I read the email. I was interested. I wanted to talk the next step.

There was no next step. There was no call to action on the email. (ok, there was a line that said call Paul, or email sales, but there was NO clickable link). Let me repeat that… there was NO CLICKABLE LINK. No way for your customers to (easily) interact with your promotion. The entire email was an image, so why not make that whole image into a link to your website? Better still, the exact page of your website that relates to that offer?

It’s like running the first 26 miles of a marathon, and stopping before the finish line.

*There’s an interesting story as to why a marathon is 26 miles and 385 yards. It dates back to the 1908 Olympic Games in London. Find out the full story here.