Common Email Marketing Mistakes & What to Do Instead
Email is a powerful marketing tool. In fact, it’s the third most influential source of information for a B2B audience. The only things more impactful are word-of-mouth colleague referrals and industry experts. Marketing is big for business, but it’s also big for consumers. To be precise, consumers who make a purchase through email are likely to spend 138% more than their non-email counterparts.
Are you using email marketing to attract your clients or customers? More importantly, are you using email effectively? In this day and age, people are bombarded with emails. They wake up with a flooded inbox, they receive ongoing email alerts throughout the day, and the influx seems endless because it is.
How will you stand out? Unfortunately, email marketing has earned itself a bad rep in the past few years. Some claim it’s dead altogether to others abandoning ship and trying new forms are marketing. We’re here today to let you know that email marketing is not dead. If you’re not seeing the results you want, you’re probably making one of these mistakes below. Here’s what you can do about it.
1. You Don’t Have an Email Marketing Plan
Having a contact list is only half the battle. Once you have those emails, you can’t just send them whatever speaks to you at any given moment. How often will you send emails? What types of emails will you send? How will these emails follow along with the customer journey?
Speaking of the custom journey, this is the roadmap for your email marketing plan. When customers first discover you and want to learn more, they join your email list. This opens them up to a welcome email. How often you interact with your email list from there is up to you, but you don’t want to be forgotten.
There is no one-size-fits-all formula for deciding how much to communicate with your audience. Around 90% of people claim they want to hear from a business at least once a month, but this might be more if you have special offers or promotions.
Solution: If you don’t have an email marketing plan, now’s the time to get one. First, map out your customer journey from interest to sale. Next, find emails that guide this journey. Leave room for promotions and special offers as well. Finally, test and adjust as necessary.
2. You Don’t Use the Right Tools
We live in a world that’s full of technology and tools intended to make our lives easier. Yet, so many marketers find themselves overwhelmed by the number of would-be solutions out there. Is an email marketing service all you need? In many cases, no.
One of the biggest challenges is integrating your email marketing service (EMS) with your customer relationship management software (CRM). If you have potential leads filling out a landing page for, for example, how do you transfer these leads to your CRM? Parserr wrote about it here to see the situation drawn out clearly.
Depending on your situation, an EMS alone won’t be enough to drive a successful email marketing campaign. You might need custom landing pages from a tool like Leadpages. You might integrate Facebook Ads and need a project management tool like Trello or Monday. This, once again, comes down to trial and error.
Solution: Don’t expect your email marketing software to be a one-stop-shop. You might need to use additional integrations to get the full picture, retain leads, and market your company effectively.
3. You Ignore Your Analytics
Finally, if there’s one mistake you don’t want to make, it’s ignoring your analytics. Unfortunately, you don’t get to be there when every individual opens your email. You don’t see if they skip over it altogether or if they read through all of your content. The closest you’ll get to see inside your users’ minds is through analytics.
Your email marketing service will include analytics tools. These aren’t just for big-name companies, they’re for marketing at all levels. Are users opening your emails? Are they unsubscribing? Are they clicking on the links within your emails? If you answered no to all of the above, it’s time to make a change.
Too few opens and an increase in unsubscribes is a sign you’re annoying your email list and need to reevaluate how frequently you send emails. On the other hand, a good number of opens with few click-throughs shows that there’s something lacking in your copy and call to action. This is a great time to test different subject lines, links, and offers. In other words, this is what A/B email testing was built for.
Solution: Use your analytics to evaluate the health and success of your current email campaigns. Depending on your problem areas, adjust your email schedule or copy as needed. Keep testing and keep trying from there.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing isn’t dead, but it is changing. Your customers are savvier than ever before. They get a lot of emails. Your email marketing needs to be strong enough to stand out to the right audience, and that’s not always easy.
Make sure you’re not falling for the mistakes above. They might seem simple, but they’re holding back your business. When done properly, email is a powerful form of communication. Make sure you’re wielding your weapon wisely.
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