What Cooking Competitions and Email Marketing have in Common

I love watching Top Chef. I will sit and watch even the reruns - Top Chef, Top Chef - Just Desserts, Masterchef Australia (That's where I draw the line). And every time I watch my current fav-chef creating his/her culinary delights, apart from my tongue salivating, my brain is echoing what I am sure are also the chef’s thoughts, – “Let the judges like it. Let the judges like it...”

Image courtesy digitalart/ Freedigitalphotos.net

Creating that perfect email campaign, in some ways, is exactly like the experience of creating the perfect dish. You start by keeping the challenge in mind - a product promotional campaign or, a thought leadership article; a webcast on the latest trends in your field or a series of mails ending with an invitation to your target audience to attend an event. Then you flip the challenge – have a look at the same from the viewer’s point of view. What is it that would really excite them enough to take a bite, what flavors are they looking for…what would it take for them to click on ‘Read More’? And then, you start the prep-work.

Unfortunately, you could have the perfect recipe which you feel is so right for the audience, the ingredients are fresh, you have all these amazing equipments and tools at your disposal and when you plate the food you can’t help but feel a sense of pride and joy. But if the judges comes along, take a bite and decide it does not suit their palate, preferring to move on to the next competitor, all you can do is store the learnings and tweak your style in the next round, i.e if you don’t get eliminated.

The last part is where the difference between the parallels drawn emerges. With cooking the contestants are dealing with a specified number of judges – professional celebrities whose taste-preferences are well-known or, easily researchable. On the other hand, while planning an email campaign the audience can run into hundreds and even thousands – customization of the messaging to that degree might just be close to impossible. So how does one ensure the maximum clicks and the highest interest quotient?

If you have the recipe down to a pat and the mix is what one would call ‘ideal’ – if the campaign is what you can truly say the result of studying and surveying a decent-sized sample of your key target audience, and you ultimately get above 60% success rate then, I say that you have just served yourself a very good deal.

What do you think? What parallels would you draw?