Compared to other online channels, email marketing is the most cost-effective and powerful platform to promote your services, products, events or business updates to customers. Enabling companies to expand their reach, emails delivered to the right address can help in creating brand awareness amidst the crowd of competitors and contribute to establishing a relationship with clients through continuous two-way communication.
Marketers can leverage email marketing not only to nurture relationships and deliver informative content to their customer base but also can assist in driving more traffic to their websites, causing an increase in conversion rates and rise in lead generation. According to reports, around 87 percent of B2B marketers’ use email marketing to generate new leads. Such statistics proves that email marketing is here to stay as the undisputed king of B2B marketing arena.
In a recent study by InfoClutch, majority of businesses are adopting email marketing strategies to boost subscriber engagement, leading to increased sales, high ROI, and overall business growth.
But, wait! Are you not getting satisfactory results from your email campaigns? Has every effort of yours failed? And you are still not able to find out the reasons behind poor performances of your email campaigns. If, yes, then you might be committing the following 14 mistakes because of which your emails are either getting deleted or sent to the spam box.
1: Poor Optimization of Emails
Every email service provider presents the emails in a unique style. The look and feel could vary from one another and the experience varies further in case of desktop and mobile.
It is important to understand how the email will appear on various gadgets with dissimilar screen resolutions. The email template is vital to a user’s response towards it. Marketing automation tools have features such as message preview and test distribution that allows studying the message behaviour from the recipient’s perspective.
A responsive email template plays critical role in preventing the messages from landing into trash. The rendering must be precise and compatible with many devices and shouldn’t defeat the recipient’s ability to effortlessly navigate. It is easier to counter this complication by choosing wisely a service provider that offers an inbuilt responsive template for seamless usage.
2: Skipping Segmentation and Personalization
Segmentation is a key aspect of successful email marketing campaigns. Sending email with unvarying pitch to every recipient or stylizing emails that are unique to every individual takes the biscuit and is an utterly miscalculated effort.
The ideal solution is “segmentation.” Grouping consumers based on common attributes easily saves cost and time consumed in crafting unique messages. The attributes can range from analyzing if the leads are cold or hot, their placement in the sales funnel, interests, and many more qualities.
With the actionable segmentation data, marketers can promote small businesses using email marketing software. The software makes it easier to send messages that are relevant to respective audience at planned intervals. Every message is crafted by carefully implanting Call To Action (CTA) for encouraging recipients to interact.
Industry wise segmentation or inclusion of first name in the email title can significantly change the conversion dynamics.
3: Focus on Promotions Only
Rather than employing email marketing to exclusively fulfil the sales roles, it makes sense to utilize its features for nurturing customers. When carried out with great care, it evokes a sense of commitment and loyalty from the audience.
The updated trends indicate the audience who are continuously engaged with resourceful content are likely to open more messages from the marketer. It isn’t always a necessity for marketer to send typical product or service related content. Sending interactive media, surveys, and quizzes can drive the engagement. Moreover, supports the overall branding.
4: Misleading Subject Lines
When message arrives in the inbox, the prominently noticeable feature is the title. The title pushes the recipients to take respective action towards the email, whether to open or not. Hence, the mundane subject line can make little to no difference at all to accomplish the marketing goals.
So, subject line requires careful though before the distribution. Testing various subject lines is also a healthy choice to assess the performance.
The subject line affects the open rates as well planned title could attract the audience and influence them to read the email. The subject line need careful consideration because, too many exclamations and spammy words such as ‘free’, ‘buy’, ‘money’, etc, elevate the chances of triggering spam filters before they even make it into the recipients mailbox.
As a matter of fact, sending overhyped subject lines can work the opposite way than intended. It must never be deceptive and must deliver the relevant message that inclines with the subject line.
Honest subject lines are likely to generate 540 percent more open rate than the ones that are cleverly crafted.
5: Embedded Messages within Image
If you got images within the email, stuffing texts within the image is unlikely to improve to improve the experience on the recipient’s part. The images stuffed with text may never load or display the text should the image fail to load due to malfunction.
Make sure, the email body has a mix of content that assures the visibility of text in case the images don’t load.
6: Too Much Text Based Content
Time is a valuable commodity; the subscriber may stay no more than a few moments scanning for visually appealing content. A consumer may read up to 50 words of textual content. It is on the marketer’s onus to convince subscriber to take subsequent action on the email.
Incorporating enticing images and keeping text based content to a minimum will impress the subscriber. Whether or not a subscriber becomes a customer is decided within the 20 seconds of opening the email.
7: Ignoring the Presentation
The subscriber receiving bcc email could deny marketers any opportunity for business because such efforts lack conviction. Instead, choose from premium email services such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, AciveCampaign and many more that provide a slew of features such as inbuilt template, analytics, tracking and scheduling to fully customize marketing email with that is compatible with many devices and are trusted by recipients.
8: Skipping the CTA
Email is a platform to channel uses into marketers landing pages. Irrespective of the content within your email, a Call To Action (CTA) will stand out to hint subscribers what they should do next.
9: Skipping the Quality Check of Emails
Look out for grammatical errors, because recipients are unforgiving towards the emails crafted in sheer desperation. No matter how small the error, it can make the users close and move on. Hence, analyze your email carefully before you send them to subscribers. Should there be a need, double verify for misspelled phrases and unreachable links.
10: The Frequency of Email Distribution
Too many emails can constrict the subscribers (almost suffocating) to point of annoyance. Find the good rhythm and maintain consistency until you get the right response. Pay attention to the open and click rates to understand the variations in the results after each distribution. The list of unsubscribes after email distribution could indicate what aspects need fine tuning.
Sending too many or too little emails can have harsh consequences. The only way to determine the exact quantity of email awaiting consignment is through the A/B test. The email preference of every segment varies from the other. In such cases, the uniquely configured demand based customization of the outbound email volume triumphs.
11: Bad Email Signup Page, Unsubscribe, and More
Many businesses skip the inclusion of sign-up page and it simply becomes a tasteless move. The prospects are harvested from ‘Contact Us’ forms and other trivial sources such as trade shows and events. This is wrong! The companies must acquire prospects by pre informing them the privacy policy and the well laid out instructions for opting out of active subscription.
Having an unsubscribe link within the email cuts the risk of recipients reporting the message as spam.
12: Unsolicited Emails
The violation of CAN SPAM is an offence that could land you into trouble. So, before sending campaigns it is important to ensure that your marketing practices are compliant and up to date with the standards.
13: Ignoring Metrics
Campaign metrics such as open and click through rates are important for tracking, coordinating and refining performance. As more clicks are registered, it increases the content reach and amplifies the progress.
Also, it is critical to track the efforts of campaign and to ensure that everything in perfectly inclined with the marketing purpose. The primary objective is tracking ROI and it is one of man important things that the small businesses miss out. ROI can be tracked by observing the conversions from email marketing campaign. The conversion could happen, online, email, or via in-store. Closely monitoring the ROI is critical for success.
14: Poor List Hygiene
List hygiene is a number one factor influencing the results. Smaller businesses must prioritize the list hygiene. Scrubbing the list periodically prevents the bounces and misses.
The email list can be properly conditioned to:
- Avoid soft bounces
- Start a reengagement campaign
- Removing generic emails disassociated with certain individuals
Clara Beck is a Marketing Advisor and Freelance Journalist based in Plano, Texas.
