If you have been in the corporate world for long enough, you may remember when “failing” was the last concept of business success. He describes the ability to go beyond failure and move on, to share your experiences with others, to understand the point of failure, to learn it and to move on.
Like most corporate shots, he came and come. Fortunately, he has never become acronym. But “failing” came in mind recently involving a parallel company in which a close friend and I invested a year ago. (No, it’s not my email agency!)
This month, we closed this business. He failed for many reasons. The whole experience was, well, an experience. We both learned a lot, but that didn’t help us keep the doors open. Now we are closing this chapter and continue.
Although this corporate failure has arrived outside my work by email, it also brings me back to what I learned of 27 years of work in all aspects of our industry, to be a newcomer in digital marketing to the management of a messaging agency today, surrounded by incredible and work that helps companies achieve their goals.
When failure East an option
All this experience of trying something new and making it fall is like a large part of what is happening in our work as marketing specialists. We feel defeated when it seems that we cannot have a step ahead of our challenges. We stick to it with easy and safe projects instead of risking the unknown to try new things.
This is the bad approach. The risk is part of life. You must take risks regularly to continue to learn, push the limits of what you know, test what you do not know and grow accordingly.
Now that we are up to the knees in 2025 and that we are trying to navigate in another year and that challenges ranging from trivial to crazy, avoiding the risk seems more attractive than ever. But it opens up to us another risk – stagnating or even delay because of our fear of failure.
Instead, let’s think about failure as something we have to accomplish and not avoid. Here are three ways to approach failure. Everyone reminds us that failure can make us stronger, better and smarter.
1. Test
When our agency speaks with potential and new customers and we evoke the subject of tests, we often hear the same thing again and again:
“We tested this once and it didn’t work.”
Oh, guy. If I gave up each time a messaging test was not working, I would be unemployed permanently.
Here is the thing about tests: tests are designed to fail sometimes – to help you discover what works and what does not work. The hypothesis you try to prove is “yes” or “no”. When you perform a test and it seems to fail, failure is not isolated from this test.
If a test fails, run it again. Try to see if you can reproduce the failure. This guarantees that your result is not a stroke of luck. Then evolve according to what you have learned.
When you configure a test, you need to integrate failures and successes to make sure your results are valid. Testing only once is not enough.
But this is one of the reasons why people hesitate to test: they don’t want to fail. It may not be just their own fear of failure. Perhaps the boss does not like failure either, and a failed test could mean the end of the test of new things.
Whatever reason, we hesitate to invest time, energy and souls in something new because we think we have wasted all these resources. But if we are good marketing specialists, these failures can teach us the direction we must follow, towards a destination that we could never have achieved if we were not risking everything, including failure and trying it.
Yes, tests have many drawbacks. But he has twice as many advantages. When I talk about tests, I don’t say that you should limit yourself to easy tests like the object line. Your object line is just a component of your email, and your message is a component of your campaign.
Kiss your test failures with your winners. Each test I did has had many failures, but I learned from them and making success.
Dig more deeply: Why tests are the most powerful tool of a marketing specialist
2. Change
Organizational change is a risk, that this means a reshuffle in the structure and management of the team or the introduction of new technologies and processes that disrupt the established commercial flow.
We see it every day in our agency because we help companies manage the migration process from one ESP to the other. These measures are already risky for companies because they involve key commercial platforms. The more we depend on the data, the more our systems become tangled because it operates on different systems, suppliers, processes and requests.
A platform migration is a risk. The big change within an organization is a risk for your work, your income and your organizational stability. But the change must be part of your commercial scheme. You cannot avoid changing and its chances of failure with failure because when you do it, you become expired. You are stuck in the quagmire of past practices.
As I mentioned above, the tests are rooted in the need to change. Change can bring a failure, but you do it for the potential of great success. You can alleviate the risk of failure by reflecting through the process as a chess master, by evaluating each movement, anticipating what could be wrong and developing plans to mitigate or protect you from this failure.
You can lead people to help you manage this change, create an atmosphere of team effort and group and accession and management consensus.
Yes, you could fail. But then you get up and assess what you have learned, make changes and now try again that you are smarter.
Dig more deeply: How to survive (and learn from) marketing errors by e-mail
3.
Over the years, I have left jobs, lost jobs and even reduced. Sometimes it was out of my control. Other times, I was not intelligent on office policy. Whenever I left a business or let go, I seriously thought about the reason why it happened. What was my fault? What could I have done differently?
It is easy to blame the business when it shows us the door. Sometimes it is the fault of the company, and sometimes it is ours.
Sometimes failure East An option, and this happens in all parts of our lives. Careers are not different. Some people move from one business to another and make the same mistakes again and again because they have not taken the time to understand the control they have to modify these results.
Do not let the fear of failure dominate your career path. Build it with each experience. If you are in a position where you do not feel appreciated or fulfilled, if the game of the day makes you miserable, look for the change. But take possession of your role in computer science.
Dig more deeply: The surprising truth about how to achieve your marketing goals
Packaging
Yes, losing a business is devastating, even if it is a jostling that you take in your leaves to help you save for a comfortable retirement. When our company closed, I had to say goodbye to talented people. I would have liked that we could find another way to solve problems, but failure is a cold and difficult fact. Sometimes things don’t work.
I learned a lot from this failure through self-reflection, which I did not do earlier when I was younger and more stupid. But along the way, while I have acquired experience, I learned that you have to look inward, that you are carrying out divided or multivariate A / B tests on an email campaign, adding new technologies, replacing systems or going from work to another. This self -reflection – and overcome the fear of failure – can shape all aspects of your experience.
If you know that things have to change, that you have to prove to your boss that a new initiative will have been paid or find a new job, you risk the risk of failure. But don’t let this prevent you from trying something new. Be intelligent. Plan your movements. Create an emergency plan if something fails. Look for the lessons for your successes and your failures.
I remember an incident of my work for an ESP when I spoiled so tall that he drew the attention of my CEO. He called me on the carpet on this subject.
“It was a big mistake,” he said. I thought her next words would be: “You were released here, friends!” Instead, he said, “What did you learn?”
I told him. He replied, “I don’t care that you failed. Do not start again. And I never did it.
Anyone want a cup of coffee?
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๐ #MR_HEKA ๐
