So often I am asked why email marketing campaigns are not well received. The content of an individual email can produce a short term drop, but a poor overall strategy contributes more heavily to slumping statistics. Four mistakes are quite serious (and often quite common) and, if not addressed, can lead to the death of your email marketing campaigns.
Trust – In all business trust is a key component. No one wants to do business with someone who they feel they cannot trust. Email marketing suffers from this even more so than other advertising channels. With spam and scams so common in email, trust becomes essential to running successful email marketing campaigns.
Trust starts at the sign up. Whether intentional or not, deceptive or misleading acquisition practices damage the marketer-subscriber relationship. Subscribers want to know why you are sending them email, how you acquired their email address and what you intend to send them in the future. If they are unsure they will be less likely to engage and more likely to take negative action. If they report your email as spam it will damage your sender reputation, and that can lead to poor inbox placement or even get you blacklisted.
Fear – Email marketing is all about repeat business. Generally speaking, the same subscribers will get your email time and again. It is important not to be afraid to try new things. Email marketing programs will become stale if new ideas and techniques aren’t implemented. See what works and what doesn’t and build on that foundation when implementing changes. Take chances. Inboxes are cluttered with email from various sources. It is important to stand out, not just from the crowd, but also from the email you sent last week.
Commitment – Continually mailing to inactive subscribers costs money. Steps need to be taken to reengage them, or at least stop wasting money by sending emails that will never produce any ROI. Finding out your subscriber’s needs is the first step to reengagement. That is the hard part, but online polls are commonplace now, so ask subscribers what they need. Once you have an idea of their needs it is as simple as sending emails to fit those needs. It is much easier to reengage existing customers than to find new ones.
Tracking – The most important part of all. It is impossible to improve your email marketing without any benchmarks for performance. Open rate, read rate, click through rate, bounce rate and unsubscribe rate are essential to any email marketing campaign. Once you have the basics covered, tying performance with revenue is the next step. Nothing is more important than knowing how much money each email is generating for your business. Checking statistics and modifying strategy based on them is the key to all email marketing.
Are your email campaigns in danger from one or more of these common mistakes? Which do you think are most damaging to program success? Want to learn more? Call us at 1-800-978-3417 or contact Active Web Group today and let us help you!
