Email marketing has a lot of advantages, some of which are the engagement of your audience, growing your readership and actualizing possible sales action from customers at little or no cost. Email marketing is a great choice when you look out for great marketing campaigns and is ideal if you are a small business owner on a quest to grow your business, but it could be a failure if not properly done. Below are 9 common mistakes that can happen while attempting email marketing.
1. Leaving out mobile optimization.
It is very common for customers to read their emails through their phones. What this means is that, one of your primary targets in email marketing is to consider mobile optimization when sending out emails. When you fail to perfect the layout of your emails, customers reading the email through their mobile phones will give it less attention and assume unprofessionality in your marketing skills, hence, deleting the message without taking or considering a purchase action.
It is very necessary to send yourself a copy of your email so as to know what appears, and how it appears on your customers mobile screen. This way you would be able to make corrections before sending them out.
2. Violation of the email marketing terms of service.
You shouldn’t overlook the terms of service of your email marketing platform. In order to prevent message spam, most platforms require you to sign up in order to generate your list. Read and give them a good skim.
3. Avoiding the segmenting of customers.
Segmenting customers is a good way to avoid sending irrelevant messages to some of your customers, most especially when you run a business that deals with different products for different customers. It is important that you consider personalizing messages to create a better connection with your customers.
4. Vague call to action.
The main idea or purpose of your emails shouldn’t be looked for while or after reading the message. Your call to action, what you want your customers to do, should be one very obvious thing in your message. One way of doing this is by using bold fonts or colours that would stand out from the rest to attract their attention. This way they would notice what you expect them to do and make their decision, but you need to be careful not to overdo it so you don’t confuse or overwhelm them. The fact is that you need to keep the action simple for them to give it consideration.
5. Hard selling.
The point of email marketing shouldn’t be about selling your products alone. You would like to build a sustainable relationship between you and your customers. One reason to do this is that it would make them see value in subscribing to you, hence not unsubscribung, even after making a purchase. The question now is how can this relationship be built?
Consider offering more value to your customers other than flooding their inbox with “click to buy” messages. For example, you own a cryptocurrency exchange platform, it is necessary to also support your marketing with crypto news update, crypto trading lessons, dos and don’ts of trading crypto, and so on. This way they would find more value in their subscription.
Doing this would make them develop trust in your service and also see the expertise in your service.
6. Neglecting analytic tools.
One of the biggest mistake you make in email marketing is not monitoring the readers who go from the email campaigns to your website. It is one of the quickest way to fade out your success in email marketing. The reason why analytics has to be monitored is to help you in developing and improving the strategy used in your email marketing because it tells you how many people opened your email, the amount of people that clicked your link, which link gets clicked the most, the amount of unsubscribers you get with each email sent, and more.
Google analytics is one of the tools several email services integrate with and when you are on the search for other tools, you should consider a platform with a wide array of analytic tool.
7. Using less engaging subject lines.
In fictional works we get drawn by the opening lines or the first paragraphs, something intriguing that would make you want to go on with flipping pages. In email marketing, it is also important to use intriguing and engaging subject lines that would make your customers feel the urge to click on your mail to have a complete read. On average, only 20.81% emails are opened across all industries. Based on research, subject line had led to 35% opening of email by their recipient.
This means having a good subject line is the first step to succeeding in your email marketing campaign. How this is done depends on the kind of audience you have in your list. Some would be profitable if you keep it professional while others would entail you to use colourful language and sometimes emojis.
Don’t forget that your subject line should be kept simple, recommended to be only fewer than 60 characters.
8. Timing wrongly.
Suprisingly, many people underrate the effect of timing in their email marketing campaign. Imagine getting a newsletter at 9pm, when you are about retiring to bed. I can bet you wouldn’t bother opening that mail.
Timing has a lot of role to play in your email marketing campaign. It is best for you to be conscious about the time you send emails to your customers. It is often recommended that you test out different time frames to know which time engages your audience better. Most time-sensitive emails are better sent in the morning when your customers are beginning their day and also to keep them updated early. Being time conscious when sending emails to your customers would also help in not making your email lost in a pile of inbox without it being open.
Study has shown that the emails sent at 11am has the highest openings, but like it has been mentioned above, try testing out different time frames to know which suits you better.
9. Ignoring personalized messaging.
Data from DMA reveals that segmentation of email list and personalization of emails are more effective strategies in email marketing campaign.
As a small business owner with smaller email list, it is easier for you to take advantage of personalizing emails, unlike the larger businesses with large email list. Personalizing your email list would get your customers or subscribers to take action. It is necessary to personalize and segment your emails so that it would distinct itself in a crowded inbox. One of the various ways to go about email personalization is including the names of your subscribers, catering your message to that individual subscriber on your list.
