Email marketing is a great communication channel widely used by online marketers to nurture leads and convert them to paying customers.
According to the content marketing institute 2021 B2B content marketing report, nine out of ten marketers use email marketing as part of their marketing strategy. While this marketing channel has proven to be effective, there are stumbling blocks you must avoid before, during and after you execute your marketing campaigns.
Here are seven email marketing mistakes to avoid and brief tips on how to do it right.
1. Buying an email list.
Buying a list is unprofessional, unethical and a terrible step for any marketing department to take. You want your mailing list to be populated by prospects who willingly subscribed for your newsletters. This implies that they are interested in what you are offering. Buying a list won't get you these quality leads.
The result of buying a list includes:
Low quality leads.
Little or no conversion rate.
Getting blacklisted & being categorised as a spam account.
2. Mediocre content
Don't joke with the quality of content you distribute to your subscribers. Ensure your content adds value. It is true that content is king, especially when you have a great content strategy.
Avoid typos and bad grammar. Be simple and clear in your communication. Don't be too formal in your speech, human beings are reading it, so write as you speak
3. Weak subject lines
This is a nosebleed of mediocre content but it has to stand alone and be emphasised. In 2022, about 333.2 billion emails will be sent and received per day.
Write powerful headlines that your subscribers will find hard to resist, making your email stand out from the pile. To experience high open rates, your subject line should at least fulfill one of the following. Your headline must be;
Ultra-Specific: Call out your target audience.
Useful: Promise a benefit that your email must fulfill.
Urgent: Create a need to act fast.
Unique: Offer something new or something common in a unique way.
4. Poor audience experience.
Those who subscribed for your marketing newsletter did so for a good experience. Don't overload your customer with several newsletters. One or two newsletter per week is enough. Respect their time otherwise they will unsubscribe. Poor customer experience can emerge from not studying or mapping out your prospects' experiential journey. Hence, not all prospects use their PC or Mac to open their email, some use their phones. Learn to design your content to suit everyone's preference by testing your content look and feel on all devices.
5. Poor tracking and management
Poor management gets you poor marketing outcomes. Without tracking your campaigns, you won't know what works and what doesn't work, causing you to be less efficient because you are marketing blindly. You need insights. Use email marketing softwares that allows you to automate your messages and track their performance each time.
6. Not segmenting your audience
Not segmenting your audience actually stems from two things: poor management and zero feedback strategy.
Not all your prospects are on the same level in their buying journey with you. Some prospects need to learn more about your brand offering while some on the other hand are ripe for conversion, hence you can't pitch your sales letter to all of them.
Segmenting your audience also allows you to test several strategies on different groups on your email list using A/B testing and implementing the feedback.
You can have an idea of the best posting times or the subject line that works after learning from your A/B testing outcomes. You can use email marketing software such as Mailchimp to achieve this.
7. Inconsistency
Consistency is tedious but needed. Inconsistency makes your marketing efforts lose momentum. Inconsistent actions creates a loop of cold email pitches which hardly yields results. Consistent email marketing accumulates a lot of well nurtured prospects for conversion overtime. We advise creating a content well scheduled calendar for execution and if the workload is too much, outsource it to experts?
In summary, running your email marketing campaigns with these mistakes will undermine your marketing success. Getting these mistakes out of the way and employing the best practices will advance you towards your business goals.
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