If your bad email marketing habits alienated your customers, it’s time to make a huge change.
An email marketing campaign done correctly is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter, according to McKinsey and Company. Unfortunately, a lot of email marketers have their bad habits or they don’t think about crucial aspects of marketing campaigns, which contribute to side effects.
What follows are five email marketing mistakes you could be making in your campaigns and tips on how to avoid each. This time I would like to indicate to you aspects unrelated to content or the right way how to write an
List segmentation
It’s one of the most important aspects before sending a campaign. A lot of marketers forget about the segmentation of their list before sending emails but it helps to discover untapped potential in the mailing list and see more improvements of it. It also helps to take a message from an email blast „one-to-many” approach to more of a „one-on-one”. It is the one thing a marketer can do to drastically increase the performance of their campaigns. It does not need to be complicated. Simple segmentation based on link clicks or origin of capture can improve deliverability to open rate to conversion. Check out more here on our blog.
Is an E-mail verification needed?
Of course, it is! Unfortunately, lots of email marketers forget about email verification. It can boost a brand’s email marketing efforts, but it also can help to streamline the e-mail marketers’ work as a whole. Certainly, less money=smaller costs of the campaign. Why would you pay for sending out emails to invalid addresses? It doesn’t make sense at all. By checking email addresses prior the send out, you can easily reduce the costs of the campaign and email real people that will actually convert. And worst of all, it is not only costing you more, but it is likely also damaging your sender reputation and impacting the number of active subscribers who are actually getting your emails in their inbox. Additionally, cleaning your list helps you separate disengaged users from inactive email accounts.
More, easier, cheaper…bought email list???
No, no, no. Why people buy email list? Maybe, they need an audience who can be emailed, maybe they need them quickly too. Ough, and if they could get them pretty cheap, that would be awesome!
That’s the mindset many marketers find themselves. However, you can’t eat the cake and have the cake. If you want high-quality email list you have to build it by yourself. It’s better to think twice! No matter how many efforts you have to do at the beginning, you will have a higher score of deliverability, satisfied customers and better results in your email marketing campaign. Build an effective email list that achieves your goals, grows traffic through targeted giveaways, converts subscribers with epic, specific incentives, and engage them frequently. Remember, a bigger list does not mean that it’s better. Focus on your target customers and appreciate those who are loyal. Okay, so now you know that is bad to use a purchased list, but how to grow your own email list? Check out more useful tips ->here.
There are some tips: Create valuable content, give them subscription options, add an opt-in incentive, etc.
Sending without testing… ough
A/B or multivariate testing is viewed too often as a nice-to-have. Each campaign is an opportunity for marketers to get to know and understand their subscribers and also customers. Each campaign should have some element of testing baked into it. From the list to the subject line, to the call-to-action. Basically, you send emails to two groups, the A group, and the B group. There will be a minor difference between the two emails, such as a subject line or the CTA, etc. Moreover, any results and findings from your tests should be incorporated into future campaigns.
I know this may seem obvious, but there are a lot of email marketers out there that test and then don’t go back and improve things on future campaigns based on the results of tests. An A/B test helps you figure out the best email marketing strategy.
Failing to use metrics
Is your email marketing campaign working? Are you 100% sure? If you don’t measure success, you can not know.
Focusing on the right metrics will help you to analyze and improve any of your marketing campaigns. Thanks to statistics you can easily assess which campaigns are valuable, which practices work best with your type of audience if A/B test would be essential for your business etc. Always monitor the changes that you’ve made within your campaign, and be a scrupulous observer of any variations in your rates. By this, you will be able to smoothly adapt your campaigns, and always get the highest ROI for them! A better way to measure your email deliverability is to evaluate a combination of email marketing metrics that will help you determine where your emails are ending up, and why they’re ending up here or there.
Conclusion
Some of the above aspects may seem obvious, but you’d be shocked at how many companies are still getting them wrong. Of course, there are many things to discuss but nevertheless, it’s a good start. After all, incremental small steps, drive steady and strategic change. No matter how much you want to have a list, remember that quality is determined by results, not quantity. It’s better to keep your list chock-full of loyal subscribers – it’s the right tactic for marketers. By avoiding frequent mistakes and bad habits, you will achieve success!
