Email Marketing: You’re Doing It Wrong!
According to Hubspot’s’ 20 Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2013, email will live on longer than you might think. Email, is an important part of online communications between a brand and its customers and recent studies show that only 2% of marketers rated leads generated from email marketing as ‘high cost,’ making email the lowest cost channel. It is no wonder that most companies adopt email as a marketing tool to promote their offerings and encourage purchasing.
However, a high number of emails fail to capture the attention of its recipients and compel them to action. If you struggle to achieve amazing marketing results through your emails here’s what you are doing wrong!
1. You talk to numbers rather than people
You view your mailing list as a bunch of names to advertise to which is just wrong. Email is the place where you can connect with your prospects based on their questions, frustrations, etc. This is how you build raving fans. When you don’t address what people truly care about, you will fail to come across as authentic whilst your messages will miss the mark.
2. The nature of your emails is self promotional
The reason why your email sucks it’s because you talk about yourself and your company like you are the most exciting topic in the world. Recipients don’t want to hear about you over and over again. Instead, they want useful information: tips, trends and best practices that will help them. When and if, you send promotional emails you should know that for promotional mailings, emails with personalized subject lines had an average open rate of 19.5%, compared to 15.1% for those without personalization.
3. You never ask: What’s in it for them ?
Consumers are becoming more intelligent than ever before. They are instrumented with smart phones, tablets and wireless internet and have easy access to endless amount of data. In short, your audience has become selective in terms of what information they are willing to read. So, if your emails don’t have something good to offer, don’t expect your subscribers to be interested in anything you have to say. Once your recipients sense that your emails have no value to them, they will quickly unsubscribe. That is the last thing you want because people who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people that do not receive email offers. So, if you want your emails to stop sucking so bad you have to think : What is it in this email for my readers ? Does anything in this email meet their needs or wants ?
4. Your subject lines have been the same since the beginning of time
64% of people say they open an email because of the subject line! If you have a brilliant copy in your email and it’s well designed but your subject line sounds boring and outdated, your email will suck in terms of performance. When your subject line sucks, people are likely to think that the email itself will suck and won’t bother opening it. To make your mailings stand out and perform well, you need to catch people’s attention. So make your subject line exciting and interesting because it is the first thing your recipients notice about your email.
5. Your content is as dull as it gets
Your email is stuffed with boring facts and stats and is lacking any emotion, personality or visualization. Copy should entice the readers and keep them interested along the journey. If you want your subscribers to pay attention to what you have to say in your email then breathe some life into your copy.
6. Your email is missing a Call To Action
If you send your emails with no real purpose as to why you’re reaching out you shouldn’t bother in the first place. You should know the purpose of your email long before you click the send button. Always think: What do I want achieve by sending this email? and let your call to action be born out of this question. Never leave it up to your readers to determine what action to take next.
7. Your email is not mobile responsive
So, your recipient is having lunch, checks his phone, sees your email, and decides to open it. However, your email design is not responsive to the layout of his mobile device, your images do not load quick enough and your text is well…tiny and all over the place. Research shows that 43% of consumers read emails most often on a smartphone (36.4%) or tablet (6.9%) as opposed to a desktop or laptop which means it’s time for you to start thinking about the recipients who are interested enough to open your email on their phone but can’t. Mobile purchasing decisions are most influenced by emails from companies (71%) so the reason why your emails don’t meet the set targets might be due to the fact that the design is not mobile responsive.
8. Your email is full of everything
The more copy you put in an email, the less likely a user is to complete your call-to-action. You also increase your risk of ending up in the spam or junk folder. Keep your copy to a minimum and include only the highlights that will inspire your readers to click-through so that you won’t lose them at hello.
9. You don’t send emails often enough for your readers to care
You’ve just mailed out your daily promotional email. Whoopie ! If you are contacting your prospects so often, no wonder they stopped caring about what you have to say long time ago. 61% of people state that “not being interested in an email” was the most common reason for not opening an email, followed by “getting too many emails” If you want your email marketing to stop sucking then you should ask yourself: How often does my audience need my content? There is no room for guessing here – you don’t want to be sending too many emails or not enough emails. So go ahead! Do some market research and if the feedback shows that your subscribers are making purchasing decisions weekly based on your information, you will know that you should email them more than just once a month.
The success of marketing emails relies heavily on the quality of content within. Content marketing can help you generate new leads, maximise brand awareness and increase sales. Find out more by downloading What is Content Marketing E-guide