Email messages are powerful, in fact, even more than other digital channels in terms of making an impact on your marketing efforts.
The messaging from your emails are the glue that keep together your whole content marketing strategy. It is where you reach out to everyone, and is still one of the most powerful and necessary concepts in inbound marketing.
Your messages are five times more likely to be viewed via email than they are on social media posts, 40 times more likely to increase customer acquisition than solid social media campaigns, and, they have a potential ROI of 3800 percent.
They Drive More Conversions than Search and Social
Emails keep leads interested, makes current clients feel involved, and is a rich source for blog posts, videos, and other curated content from your contacts’ list of needs.
They let people know what’s new, what’s happening, from promotions to industry updates, and they enhance your brand’s relevance.
Let me begin with some stats:
- A report by the McKinsey Global Institute revealed that 28 percent of the work week on average is taken up by email. This means that a lot of email interaction goes on in the office.
- For marketers, however, what’s more relevant is that email interactions are happening at various points through the day.
- According to Salesforce, 44 percent of email recipients make at least one purchase based on promotional emails.
- Kapost goes further to suggest that on average, a marketer can get $44.25 return on average for every $1 spent on email marketing.
Shouldn’t Your Email Campaign Perform Better?
Well, even with such promising statistics, Meclabs notes that only 60 percent of marketers reported a positive ROI from email marketing campaigns.
So why isn’t the remaining 40 percent not making any positive returns?
This post looks at the mistakes and lessons you can learn from an unsuccessful email marketing campaign so you can make yours better going forward.
1. Sending Unsolicited Emails
If you have ever received unsolicited emails yourself, you know how frustrating it can get when someone else invades the privacy of your inbox – especially an anonymous marketer.
What to do: To resolve this, you can use a double opt-in protocol such that subscribers can not only request access to your mailing list, but also confirm that they actually made the request.
According to MailChimp data, double opted-in subscribers showed total message opens with a 75.6 percent increase compared to single opt-in recipients. They also have a 114 percent increase in clicks.
2. Sending to Bad Email Addresses
You may be using a reputable service provider for your email marketing campaigns, but, if you have bad email addresses in your mailing list, you can get one of two problems.
The first is getting charged by the number of people in your mailing lists, so you pay more each time you’re sending messages to an inflated list.
Secondly, you are sending messages to addresses that are inactive, and this poses a risk of having your account blacklisted by the top email providers like Yahoo or Google.
What to do: Try using tools that will validate your lists prior to sending out your next email campaign.
3. Messages Are Oversold and Not Personalised
The content of your email campaigns matter.
You may be tempted to try and cut through the inbox clutter using grandiose messages but, if they don’t live up to their hype, then subscribers are definitely guaranteed to leave with disappointments.
While it is all in order to encourage readers to click, if they keep getting let downs when they read your content, there’s a long term, negative impact. You’re better off sacrificing a few clicks but maintain your brand’s integrity.
Similarly, when content isn’t personalized, it may look pretty, but won’t deliver on opening rates and click-through rates.
What to do: Don’t hype up your messages and deliver shallow content.
Personalization is powerful and should be incorporated into your email campaigns. It delivers higher open rates and click-through rates.
4. No Call-to-action (CTA) or They’re Too Many
Once you have settled on an optimal mailing frequency for your brand, ensure each message that gets sent out delivers value for your brand, prompting its recipients to take a particular action after they’ve read it.
Few marketers get this right, some forget to add a CTA, and others insert too many competing CTAs in the same email.
What to do: Give a single, super compelling CTA. Add a call to action on each email, for example, download a report, or click on a code link for a coupon – the important thing is to include one CTA that is well-defined. You can even add a video thumbnail as your CTA and this delivers three times the number of click-throughs compared to any other CTA you may use.
5. Bad Landing Pages
This is more of an anticlimax when it comes to an email campaign.
Your messages may be good enough to have prompted people to click and come to your page, but the landing page may be a complete turn off.
The design of your site matters. If it isn’t appealing or offers are not stated clearly and the content therein is not valuable or helpful, your conversions will suffer.
You can tell you have bad landing pages if your dashboard metrics for email marketing look good, but there’s a high bounce rate on the landing page.
It means your site’s content could be to blame for an unsuccessful campaign.
What to do: Invest in good landing page templates or a good design for your site. You can check through different website or landing page templates, or get a good web developer/designer to help with one that converts better.
Upshot
Failure is usually one of the best chances to rediscover the paths to success, and an unsuccessful email campaign is no exception. Get to the important stuff: plan a robust, engaging and exciting email marketing plan that isn’t an afterthought to importing email addresses endlessly.
The most important things for your campaign are being consistent and authentic, besides how to achieve them all in your campaign. Put it all together, and you’ll find that your best bet is to tweak as you go along, while sending emails regularly.
That’s how you can achieve impressive stats, and surpass them too, using the one online medium communication that’s proven itself – the email.
For more email marketing articles, check out these insightful articles on Marketing.com.au: