In today’s world of content shock and short attention spans, email remains the only way to communicate a marketing message effectively to thousands of customers at the same time. With an average ROI of 3,800% and about four billion email users worldwide, it comes as no surprise that 95% of business organizations consider it a powerful sales channel.
Competition is high. Tons of email marketing rules and trends are online. Experts get ahead of themselves, creating and implementing sophisticated email strategies for their business development. But aimed at overtaking rather than copying competitors, they forget the basics.
Well, you know, a kinda “Pfff, I already know that!” stuff.
In chase of skyrocket open rates and conversions, marketers risk getting trapped with the most common mistakes. Seemingly evident, these mistakes can cost a fortune.
Check if you make these errors in your current email marketing strategy.
This mistake is common for newbie marketers. With a mailing list in a pocket, they start using a mailing module of their corporate CRM-system for sending newsletters and sales emails to customers.
And though such modules are more functional than traditional mail providers, they don’t give you any features to implement at least one effective email campaign. After all, email marketing is more than just a series of one-time mailings.
Most CRM-systems don’t have any analyzing features for you to check consumer engagement and interaction with your emails. They won’t show if your email was opened or clicked, what text or visual looked more persuasive for subscribers and which devices they used to check marketing emails from you.
More than that, sending emails from corporate servers and domain names isn’t safe: if a mail provider marks such emails as spam, the whole business will come to a halt.
Email marketing services are true saviors here. They are cost-effective, easy to manage and allow to automate your company emails for direct contact with customers, which no CRM-system can do.
You probably already have a long-established database of subscribers. Let’s say you’ve collected them with proven methods, but many consumers in this list have not yet received anything from you. And now, you start a new email marketing campaign and decide to send them a sales email to increase their engagement and (why not?) conversion.
Wrong.
As you know, all mail providers set requirements to your mailing list quality. Also, they set limits on the number of allowable returns and complaints. So, sending your emails massively to all those subscribers will cause you to exceed the complaints limits and get blocked.
The reason, step by step:
- Your prospects don’t remember about you, so they start moving your email to “Spam.”
- Mail providers stop delivering your emails to “Inbox.”
- Both consider you a spammer.
- You lose reputation and trust, and all emails from your server system get blocked.
What to do:
Reactivate your email list before reaching out to them with your new marketing campaign. Set up your email inbox to send them welcome emails offering to confirm their interest in your company’s activities and willingness to receive letters from it.
And don’t forget about the “unsubscribe” option: thus you’ll exclude outdated email addresses and lower your bounce rate, working with loyal consumers only.
Default segmentation remains the highest priority for 80% of email marketers, and no wonder: segmented emails drive 18 times more revenue. So you group consumers based on their profile data and interaction with your emails.
But what about RFM analysis for a more advanced segmentation?
Every new detail you learn about a consumer can help you make a more detailed personalization and more relevant offers in emails. Ignoring a segmentation by interests, you lose an opportunity to respond on time and “catch” a consumer.
Integrating your email platform with your CRM system, you can automate the creation and distribution of emails with offers that hook consumers and persuade them to buy. As you know, triggered emails work best here:
- They are more relevant, so consumers open such emails 73% more often than newsletters.
- Triggered emails have click-through rate 152& higher than traditional ones.
- The most effective triggered email is abandoned cart emails.
Behavioral segmentation, CRM-email platform integration, and triggered emails are the strategies all best e-commerce marketing campaigns use for working with LTV successfully.
If content is king of marketing, then email personalization is its queen. Only the lazy don’t speak or write about it since it has to grow sales and increase benefits. But its implementation requires accuracy from email marketers.
Yes, prudent personalization influence email open- and click-through rate, as well as target conversion. Calling a consumer by name in the email subject and body, creating personalized email headers and addressing a relevant occasion (a birthday, a credit offer, a personal discount), will give you a positive response. However, some pitfalls are still here:
- First, make sure all the data of a customer profile is correct. Otherwise, you risk sending them something like “Dear [email protected].” Sometimes subscribers misprint their names or write nonsense or jokes in name fields. Using them automatically in the hope for loyalty, you risk getting the opposite reaction.
- Second, make sure you use the right tone of voice. While the B2B sector expects a sort of formality, subscribers of some e-commerce or online media for Gen Z hipsters will find it awkward.
- And third, avoid excessive personification when sending general ad info without reference to customer behavior. Emails about opening a new office, changes in deposit rates, etc. are enough to segment by demographics and geolocation.
More than that, users today are clever enough to understand that personalization is made automatically, so calling them by names in every corner may not cause the same positive effect as it was before.
You know that a subject line in your marketing emails matters. The problem is, some specialists abuse its power in chase of high open rates: they mislead or even lie to subscribers, using clickbait.
Okay, 47% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line. But what happens when they open it and see a subject line and body mismatch? It disappoints, they consider it a manipulation, mark it as spam and unsubscribe. Needless to say, it will hurt the overall marketing campaign.
More than that, 69% of recipients report email as spam based on the subject line. So you need to understand the fine line between a clickbait and invitation to open an email with relevant offers. Don’t confuse consumers with email subject lines: make them short and clear, relevant to the content you’ll share in email bodies.
Tips:
- Personalized subject lines are 22% more likely to be opened.
- The word “free” in subject lines decrease open rates (users consider it spammy), while the word “gift” increase it.
- Writing “thank you” in subject lines can double the open rate of your emails.
And remember about A/B testing of subject lines to find your “magic” words that work best.
For building effective online communication with consumers, a relevant email message is what helps to grow sales and loyalty toward brands and products. The above”deadly mistakes” have already cost wasted budgets to some companies; but now we have the knowledge, skills and tools to avoid them and make the most out of successful email marketing campaigns.
