17 Jul Top 7 Email Marketing Errors
Email marketing is both one of the most effective and cost-efficient methods to engage with audiences for small businesses. This is why an email marketing strategy is essential in today’s online market. In order to enjoy the full benefits of an email marketing campaign, it’s important to know the email marketing mistakes to avoid. First, though, let’s look more into the importance of email marketing for businesses.
Why Is Email Marketing So Important for Business?
Don’t just take our word for it—there are many statistics supporting the importance and influencing power of email marketing for all businesses.
According to The Radicati Group, more than half of the world population uses email as of 2019, which equals about 3.9 billion people. By 2023, that number is anticipated to grow to 4.3 billion email users. Additionally, the total number of consumer and business emails sent and received is expected to exceed 293 billion emails daily in 2019. With this increase in worldwide email use, it’s no surprise that younger audiences still largely use email even with the increase of social media, and about 90% of employees check their personal email accounts at least one every few hours.
Email marketing, then, is clearly the most direct way to reach your audience to achieve success the potential for continued growth. However, this success can only be reached through email with the right marketing strategy.
Top Seven Email Marketing Errors Businesses Should Avoid
If you want your email marketing campaign to be effective, you need to make sure that you avoid these email marketing mistakes:
1. Pushing Sales
Email marketing is more than simply selling your products or services—it’s also about developing a relationship with your customers. Sales and web traffic are not likely to increase unless your audience feels valued in their relationship with your brand. If your email revolves solely around selling your products or services, your customers will stop engaging. Maintain engagement and increase sales with a healthy balance between relevant content and product promotion.
Relevant content types can include (but are not limited to) industry-related tips, links to helpful content on other websites that your audience is likely to also visit, links to internal brand blogs, and video content. In between this more engaging content is where you want to place your new, relevant products and sales promotions. These steps towards building a brand relationship with your audience will both boost your reputation as an industry leader and increase your conversion rates.
2. Spammy or Unengaging Subject Lines
Your email’s subject line is your first line of defense against deletion without even being opened by your audience. Keep email open rates high with an effective subject line. While you certainly want to grab your audience’s attention, you also don’t want your business appearing as spam if the titles are too overbearing or too vague. Every audience engages differently, however, so it might take some testing to see what’s most effective for a title. Creative email subjects that are personal, conversational and casual tend to lead to the best open rates, and, therefore, the most engagement and sales.
3. No Mobile Optimization
Today, more people access their email on mobile devices than on desktops. If your email won’t open or won’t display correctly on a smartphone or tablet, customers will quickly delete your email without a second thought. To ensure that your marketing emails work and look proper on mobile devices, send test emails to multiple mobile device types before sending out the full email blast. User experience is crucial to effective email marketing. It only takes a few minutes to perfect the format of your email, which will be well worth the effort.
4. Foregoing Personalization
Customers want to feel like valued individuals, not simple metrics. Personalizing your emails can drastically improve engagement with your audience. Segmenting your email campaigns according to age and gender along with including the customer’s name in the subject line or first line of the email text are easy and direct ways to personalize marketing emails. Small businesses may also have the benefit of creating even more detailed personalization from segmentation based on shopping behaviors and interests. The goal is to show customers that you value them and value creating an engaging user experience with your business.
5. Not Tracking Analytics
There’s no way to know how successful or unsuccessful your email campaigns are performing unless you are tracking that performance. Without knowing how well they are being received by audiences, there is also no way to accurately improve to see continued engagement and sales. That’s where tracking analytics come into the picture. Analytics allow you to view open rates, click-through rates, subscribers, time spent reading the email, and more. There are many email marketing analytics tools available, and most email campaign platforms have built-in analytics features. No matter how you are tracking them, analytics are the key to improving your email marketing.
6. Forgetting a Call to Action
Emails shouldn’t be sent aimlessly—they need a mission, a purpose. While there can be more than one purpose to an email campaign, there needs to be an end goal that you are trying to get your audience to reach. If your customers aren’t sure what they are supposed to do after reading your email, then you are in need of a clear call to action. A call to action, or CTA, can be encouraging users to subscribe, make a purchase, click to an external link and more. However, the action must be easy to access in very few clicks. It’s also important not to overwhelm and turn away readers with too many CTAs. Keep it simple, and keep it clear. Audiences want to engage, so make sure they can!
7. Neglecting GDPR
Email marketing requirements were updated in May 2018 with changes to GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation. By law, businesses sending emails (outside of the U.S.) must show proof that all customers who receive emails have willingly opted in to receiving them. No matter where your business and customers are located, it’s still best to comply with these new requirements to avoid being labeled as spam and to show responsibility on the part of your business to your consumers.
Start Your Email Marketing Campaign
Email marketing campaigns remain one of the most effective marketing methods for reaching your audience, engaging with customers and increasing sales. If your business is ready to rake in the full benefits of email marketing, let Virtual Stacks Systems UK help you out. Our email marketing plans are customizable to the needs of your business and your customers. Contact us today to learn more!