5 Email Marketing Mistakes to Fix For Success
Email marketing has been considered the single most effective means of improving awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. A recent study by ReportLinker shows that close to half of adults check their email first thing in the morning, so why do so many of these emails get ignored?
Statistics reveal that when a subscriber receives an inappropriate email, 60% immediately delete the email, 27% unsubscribe and 23% mark the email as spam. It’s clear that the more irrelevant an email is, the more annoyed the recipient gets. Below are a few marketing mistakes that could destroy your brand along with simple corrections to ensure email marketing success:
1. Emailing too frequently
Nothing is more bothersome than having an excessive rate of marketing emails. Sometimes, frequent emailing in marketing seems to pass another message to subscribers—from a market survey conducted in October 2016 by MarketingSherpa, consumers were asked why they unsubscribed from brands’ email lists. One in four said it was due to an excessively high volume of emails.
2. Not optimizing email for mobile
A recent study shows that out of the 900 million active Gmail users, a whopping 675 million access their box through mobile phones. With this many mobile users, it’s imperative to optimize email for mobile. There is a consumer expectation that if they take the time to open an email, they shouldn’t have to take extra steps to view the email properly.
Besides, with so much time spent on mobile phones, you have a better chance of reaching and engaging with your audience if your email content is optimized and formatted across all mobile platforms.
3. Not allowing subscribers to reply
You mean you’re sending an email to me with a do-not-reply address? What do you take me for? This is the first thing that comes to a customer’s mind when they see that [email protected] address: DELETE.
When customers receive emails from “do not reply” addresses, they decode it as the company saying, “We don’t have time to talk to you, but please read what we send you and subscribe to our service anyway.” If you’re going to take the time to put together an email marketing campaign, at least provide your subscribers with an email that they can reply to; and even better, add multiple contact sources so they have access to you. Sometimes all it takes is a quick email reply with some additional information to convert a sale or develop a customer relationship.
4. Using a boring subject line
When it comes to email marketing, you have 3-4 seconds to grab your reader’s attention and get them interested in what you’re communicating. What’s the one thing you need to get right in order to make this happen? That’s right – it’s the subject line. Customers don’t want to waste their precious time reading something irrelevant. They make that determination after the first few words of the subject line. The subject line dramatically impacts your open rate and your open rate determines whether or not customers engage with your content. How valuable your content is determines if the customer follows your immediate or eventual call to action.
“You can take open rates from 1-5% all the way to 30-40% simply by writing a better subject line. Don’t ignore it. It makes the readers click!”
5. Not securing your email data
When it comes to running a business, your customers’ documentation is your most valuable asset. When customers, after receiving your email marketing campaign, decide to disclose their personal and financial information to you, they are taking a bold step of credence that you will not (intentionally or accidentally) lose and abuse it. Besides, misplacement or mismanagement of your customer database acquired through email marketing or otherwise is the beginning of business doom.
