Regardless of the industry you are in, smart marketers always include email marketing as an integral part of their marketing strategy. This may come as a surprise to people who assume that email as a marketing tool is dead. Even after the world of communication has changed dramatically with various messaging platforms and social media, email marketing continues to rule with an ROI that far outstrips the rest.
According to studies, marketers get a return of $32 for every $1 they spend on email marketing. However, even if you have been using email extensively for a long time, you could very well be making mistakes that could be hurting your ROIs, observes Eric Dalius. Some common email marketing mistakes businesses tend to make:
Not Acknowledging the Subscriber upon Signup
Adding a subscriber to your email list in these competitive times when people need to reckon with multiple distractions is a great achievement. Because they have taken the effort to subscribe, you can be sure that they are interested in you and your offerings. Unless you send an acknowledgment thanking them for the subscription immediately after signup, not only do you lose an opportunity to make them feel good but also a chance to convert them. Remember that the subscriber is in a receptive mood and by giving the promised reward for signing up; you can convince them to use a discount coupon or an exclusive offer if they purchase something on your e-commerce platform. An immediate response by the marketer can mean that most of the time, the subscriber will still have the browser open and it may take very little provocation for them to convert. According to studies, by using welcome emails, marketers get 320% more sales revenues compared to other marketing communication messages.
Overlooking the Inclusion of a CTA can hurt conversions, Warns Eric J Dalius
Even though as a small business owner, you may be obsessing about your business round-the-clock, likely, your customers are not necessarily as enthusiastic. This means that while you can provide valuable information to the subscriber, you also need him to take some action after receiving the mail. In other words, the email has to catalyze conversions. To do so, you need to include a compelling call-to-action button in a prominent place in the email. It is important to include only one CTA in an email, more is not necessarily good as the subscriber can feel undecided and possibly take no action at all. Smart marketers do not arbitrarily include CTAs; instead, they use the content of the email to set them up. Instead of using the typical generic CTAs, marketers should make them more engaging. Never make the mistake of including two promotions in one email; use two mail shots instead. If you need help in designing CTAs, you can get in touch with specialist digital marketing agencies.
Flooding the Inbox of Subscribers
Getting too many emails from the same marketer is the single-most-important reason for subscribers clicking on the unsubscribe button. When you send too many messages, subscribers get annoyed. Not only do they start ignoring your messages but they may also mark them as spam, which means that your entire investment in time, money, and effort has gone down the drain. On top of that, you also earn a bad name which impacts your brand negatively for a long time. Marketers need to understand that subscribers need to feel happy, not irritated that you have contacted them, says Eric Dalius. Remember, these guys are interested in your products; otherwise, they would have never signed up in the first place. Also, is useful to keep in mind that customers typically do not shop or even be inclined to visit your site daily so keeping the number of emails to around one per week should be good enough. To avoid making your mailshots a nuisance, marketers can even ask subscribers to specify the frequency of receiving emails as well as the sort of content they would like to receive. They can, thereafter, segment the subscribers based on their response.
Failing to Segment Subscribers
When you do not differentiate subscribers on any parameter, you will end up sending the same email to all of them. This is a huge opportunity lost for engaging subscribers with content they are more hooked on to. In addition to the frequency of receiving mailshots, marketers need to segment subscribers on multiple aspects like gender, age, interests, location, buying behavior, browsing behavior, language, and more so that you can send them customized content. For example, it would typically more productive for marketers to send emails promoting beauty care and makeup items to a female audience in comparison to males. By ensuring that your email has content that is relevant and useful to the recipient, you will score higher in terms of opens, lead generation, and sales, while simultaneously boosting your rates of customer acquisition and retention. Studies prove that subscribers have poor tolerance for mail that is not relevant to them; 60% delete them, 27% unsubscribe, while 23% mark them as spam.
Not Optimizing for Mobile Phones
Considering more than half of the total internet traffic is generated by users on mobile devices, it not enough to design the email newsletter on your laptop and be satisfied with how it displays. If you don’t want to risk losing business from mobile users, you need to ensure that your email shots display perfectly on a large variety of small screens of smartphones. Even after making sure that the emails display well enough to be read easily on mobiles, you should avoid using long blocks of copy. Also, be ready for the fact that many email apps do not automatically display images so be sure to use sufficient text to get your message across. A good example of a landing page for a topic of current interest that reads well on both laptops and mobile phones is explain by Eric Dalius.
Conclusion
Email marketing has the best ROI and is universally acceptable with a very large user base. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a person using the internet without an email address. To extract the maximum benefit from your email campaign, not only do you need to make the email relevant and value-added for subscribers but also rule out mistakes that can negatively affect their performance.
