Email marketing is a promotional tool adopted by most small businesses to improve their reach and communicate about their offerings with their potential audiences. With a solid email marketing strategy, business owners can convert new customers and improve their brand recall with their existing customers.
However, there are many business owners who do not seem to understand that there are certain mistakes they must avoid making in order to effectively communicate with a potential customer through email marketing. Here are some of the most common ones they make:
- Not welcoming your subscribers
A new subscriber just got added to your list! In this situation, most brand marketers wait until their next newsletter or next offer to contact them. This is where things start going wrong. It is ideal to send across a welcome email to your new subscribers. Most subscribers have the tendency to open these welcome emails attributing to a relatively higher open rate. There is a reason a person signs up for your newsletter. It can be because the business has an ecommerce shop and something was promised along the lines of an exclusive discount or offer for people who signed up for your email updates. This clearly indicates that the visitor has a purchase intention. Hence, a welcome email is important so that the business doesn’t miss out on potential customers. - Not including call to action
As a business owner, one tends to always have their own interests in mind. An ideal scenario would be that your customers feel the same way as you do for your brand. To drive them somewhat closer to this state, all of the emails sent need to have a purpose and include a clear call to action that serves your purpose well. Otherwise, the recipient might not know what action to take post receiving the email and hence would eventually ignore the message. Be it a newsletter or any update, there should always be a certain CTA to drive that would entice conversions. - Sending excessive emails
Most companies make the mistake of bombarding their subscribers with too many messages all day. An average working professional receives around 121 emails per day*. That makes it a whopping 44,000 emails received each year! Hence it comes as no surprise that the number one reason why people unsubscribe from mailing lists is to avoid getting spammed by too many promotional emails. No business owner would want its customers to associate that feeling with their website and brand. They should look forward to receiving messages from you and carefully acknowledge it rather than feeling annoyed by the frequency of the emails. They signed up to receive updates and offers from your website, which translates to them having interest in the content delivered by you. Thus, it is crucial to strategically decide the frequency of email promotions to suit the needs of your brand and its target audience.*Source – https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/email-statistics/ - Not focusing on segmentation
Most businesses make the naïve mistake of having one master email list where each unique subscriber receives the same content at the same time. It is important to understand that each subscriber is different, some may prefer to receive messages more frequently as compared to others. Some subscribers may only be interested in promotions and coupons, while others may be intrigued by your newsletter.For example, let’s say you own an ecommerce brand. A 25-year-old female subscriber will most likely not be interested in the same products and offerings as a male subscriber in his 40s. Sending the same communication to two drastically different subscribers is a futile exercise.The following parameters must be considered – location, age, sales cycle, language, lifetime value, interests, browsing behaviour, purchase power and behaviour. - Non responsive email campaigns
Today, the smartphone is a device most people use. It is the go-to device for communicating on the go. Hence, it is necessary to check how the email would look on mobile devices. It is advisable to use an email marketing software that will have mobile-optimized features.However, the best way to do this is by sending a test email to yourself so that you can check everything before it goes out to the masses. Even if your message is technically mobile-friendly based on the test run through your email software, there are other things you should keep in mind.
- One should avoid long blocks of text. An email with two or three content lines on a desktop computer could preview as ten lines on a 4-inch smartphone screen.
- An email should contain visuals, however relying too heavily on images isn’t a good idea. The reason for that is some email apps won’t automatically display images. Hence, if the entire message is based on the context of the picture, there are high chances it might be missed out by your audience.
It is crucial to identify these mistakes and keep them in consideration while drafting campaigns. By keeping these points in mind combined with your own strategic business objectives, businesses can create efficient email campaigns and hence, achieve their business objectives.
