Email marketing has become increasingly popular and is one of the proven ways to get leads and nurture them into paying customers.
However, many brands are culprits for making certain mistakes during their email marketing campaigns. These mistakes might seem insignificant, but they might also hurt your entire email marketing campaign, and you do not want to waste your marketing and local SEO efforts doing something that won’t yield results.
We have created a list of common email marketing mistakes that brands make to guide you. This guide will protect you from making mistakes and improve your email marketing campaigns. Before diving into the guide, let us briefly define what email marketing is all about to give you a proper understanding.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that uses emails in a personalised manner to drive a brand’s audience to make a purchase or nurture new leads to the point where they want to patronise the brand.
It is the most effective way of connecting with your leads, nurturing them and turning them into paying customers. It also helps increase the legitimacy of your business as it helps you connect with your customers better.
Email marketing is important for your business because it has a high lead conversion rate with an equally high ROI (about 4400%). This means that it can be a huge gold mine when used properly.
Aside from this, though, it is one of the most effective and private communication channels, and there is no danger of having a suspended account, unlike social media. This means that your leads are yours forever, as long as they don’t unsubscribe. The secret to preventing that is by employing the right email marketing strategies.
Unsubscriptions are the nightmare of any email marketer; however, it is sometimes inevitable. This is why it is important to know how to employ the right strategies to prevent unsubscriptions, maintain your leads and increase them.
Email Marketing Practices Your Brand Should Not Overlook
Ensure your email campaigns are segmented
This is a practice that many brands overlook. However, data gotten from Campaign Monitor affirms that marketers who segment their emails see as much as a 760% increase in revenue!
Segmenting your email campaigns simply means dividing your email lists into groups based on their similarities. For instance, segmenting based on their sales funnel position, location, gender, etc. Let’s say you have an email list with people that are yet to patronise you. You could send them content that will move them farther down the sales funnel, like coupons, promo codes, etc.
This segmentation helps create personalised and relevant emails, which leads to high engagements and conversions.
Make your email content personalised
Spammy, impersonal emails are very annoying, and everyone tries to avoid them as much as possible. When people avoid your emails, it could hurt your email marketing campaign because the conversion rate would be very low.
Personalising your emails is important as it helps create a bond between you and your contacts, potentially leading to more conversions.
You can personalise your content using personalisation tokens when sending emails. These serve as placeholders for the name of the recipient. For example, instead of saying “hello, customer”, you could say “hello, Maria”. Doing this increases the interest of the recipient in opening the mail.
If, however, the email loses relevancy when it is personalised, it is advised to ignore this practice, as relevancy trumps personalisation.
Your email should offer value
Your audience’s interests should always be at the forefront of your mind when preparing email marketing campaigns. Discover their pain points, create content that offers solutions to those problems, and dish out the contents through your emails.
Even if you are not making sales, you should be consistent with it, as people need to know, like, and trust (KLT) your brand before patronising your services. Giving value is one way to hack the KLT process and convert your email leads to paying customers.
Make it easy to unsubscribe
While it’s important to grow your mailing list, it’s also okay if subscribers want to unsubscribe from your mailing list. You should let them go and not make unsubscribing harder for them because it could hurt you. Your emails might be classified as spam, or you might get a high rate of hard bounces (when emails are unopened).
Also, don’t add manipulative copies on the unsubscribe page to trick the customer into staying. Just let them go, and work on getting more leads.
Set a frequency for your emails
Setting a frequency for sending emails is vital for email marketing. The frequency of sending emails differs from business to business depending on what you specialise in. It is important not to send emails too often, as they could be considered spammy. Also, not sending emails often could lead to not being visible or relevant to your audience, and they could forget you.
Finding the right frequency is vital, especially if you’re just starting. Eventually, you can up the frequency, especially if you get a high engagement rate.
Have a content schedule for your email content
A content calendar is essential to help you stay on top of your email marketing game. It helps you stay organised, plan and know what type of content to dish out, and set the frequency for sending.
Every email content calendar is unique to your business, so ensure to plan what works for you and your audience, as they’re your priority.
Pay attention to your visuals (layout and design)
Visuals are essential for email marketing. Bad visuals could make your audience lose interest in your emails, as nobody wants to struggle to read out your content.
Also, ensure that your emails are both desktop and mobile optimised to display cleanly on your recipient’s screen. Additionally, your visual aids (flyers, images, etc.) should all be high resolution and appeal to the recipient.
Avoid spam triggers
MailChimp’s data has shown that certain words trigger spam filters when included in your emails. If a mail ends up in the spam list, it is most likely to end up not being seen by anyone.
To avoid this, take note of the following when writing your email content, especially in the subject line;
– Don’t use all caps when typing the subject line
– Avoid exclamation points
– Use a clean mail list of people who have signed up to receive your emails
– Avoid using exclamation marks
– Be wary of using symbols like $ and %.
– Avoid words like “free”, “percent”, “help”, “apply”, etc.
Making these small changes might positively affect your entire email campaign and ensure that your email goes directly to your recipient’s inbox.
Have a unique signature
Having a unique signature at the end of your email adds to the personalisation needed to stand out to your subscriber.
Aside from just including your name, your email signature is a great way to include more info about your brand to promote it and build trust with your audience. Some interesting things to use as a unique signature include;
– Social media links
– Contact information
– Witty/motivational quotes
– Special offers/promotions
– Website info
These little changes can make a difference in boosting your brand’s visibility and credibility.
Conclusion
Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing in the age of digital marketing. It is also one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, which makes it trusted by many marketers.
A good email marketing campaign needs to follow some of the best email marketing practices to ensure its success. Some of the tips might seem insignificant, but they make a lot of difference in your campaign.
As a business owner, it is essential to pay attention to these details, implement them, constantly review your strategy and make any changes that need to be made. Doing all these ensures easier and more productive marketing campaigns.
