Email marketing is a form of digital marketing used to direct contact with consumers and help promote businesses, but they can go as bad as they can work out. Here are the 5 ways email marketers ruin their brilliant would-be campaigns.
Email marketing remains, to this day, one of the most profitable online marketing strategies, if not the most. About 60% of online marketers claim that email marketing is, by far, their most effective strategy. This is why these figures would surprise you if you’re part of the 40% for whom email marketing doesn’t work too well.
Want some idea on what you’re doing wrong? Here are 5 ways how you and other email marketers sabotage their brilliant would-be campaigns:
- Sending the same message to every subscriber:
Autoresponder is usually used to create and send an email to multiple contacts. However, many people mistake it for meaning that you send the same email to all contacts. However, if you do that, your readers will feel like they are not appreciated, and they’ll eventually lose interest.
This can have a really bad impact on a new marketing campaign. To avoid it, you need to make it special and interesting for each and every reader. The first thing you need to start doing is personalizing your emails and segregating your subscriber lists into groups according to their age, demographics, interests, etc.
This may sound like a great deal of work, but if you’re clever, you can pull this off without putting too much time into crafting individual emails for every subscriber. You can also find awesome email marketing tools that do this work for you. After obtaining the data, you simply have to add the final touch to your emails.
Even by the simple act of addressing each subscriber by their name and using a lot of active voice, you can make your email three times more appealing to read. If you do not have such information, use the geographical location of your readers to make the message more relevant.
According to SwiftERM, personalized emails outperform non-personalized ones in multiple key metrics, boasting a 26% higher open rate, a 14% higher click-through rate, and generating an impressive 18% more revenue. Furthermore, a significant 60% of consumers exhibit a greater inclination to engage with businesses that tailor their email communications, while a substantial 72% express a higher likelihood of opening an email addressed to them by name. Additionally, 55% of consumers are more inclined to click on email links when the content aligns with their specific interests.
- Forgetting to include a call to action:
Including a regular message is important; however, no matter how interesting your emails are, readers need to be reminded of a call to action. People are used to receiving emails with text, images, and lots of information. However, this can also confuse them instead of helping them in making a decision.
This is where the call to action comes in. Call to actions are simple phrases or, well, calls that prompt a user to take action for something. When readers skim through the email, these call to action should be easy to spot in relevant places.
Whether it be telling your readers to click on a link to your website for an audio podcast, or a button that opens up a service or a promotion, having a call to action increases your email interaction by ten-fold. It also makes the email more interesting.
Because we’re all psychologically wired to respond to call to actions favorably more times than not.
According to MailerCloud, the typical click-through rate (CTR) for Email CTAs ranges from 3% to 5%, indicating that out of every 100 emails sent, only 3 to 5 individuals are likely to engage with the call-to-action. Notably, personalized call-to-actions exhibit a substantial 202% improvement over generic CTAs, underscoring the increased likelihood of recipients clicking on a CTA when it is customized to their preferences and needs.
- Forgoing the use of autoresponders:
While they may have been cold and robotic in their operations some time ago, autoresponders have gone through some major revamping over the years, so much so that they’ve become pretty decent at their job.
And the best part about using them is that they’re computer programs that can immediately reach out to subscribers, which makes relying on manual labor, which is slow and ineffective, a dumb idea.
When used effectively, autoresponders can do much more and interact with your target audience. For example, when a person purchases a product, you can use autoresponders to send them a confirmation email. Doing so tells them that their purchase has been made, and the timely message also increases their trust.
Other uses of autoresponders include sending behavior-based messages and thank you messages etc. While these are easy to create, you can also and personalize the emails to make sure it is relevant to your reader’s interest.
- Adding too many images in your emails:
A picture is worth a thousand words, and you should always, always include graphics in your emails to make them look more appealing and readable. However, adding too many pictures will have the same effect as writing a lot of fluff words. There is a point where you go too far, where adding more photos defeats the purpose of having added them in the first place.
See, pictures and videos are significantly larger than text data, so the more pictures you add, the more time your email takes to load when a subscriber opens it. This also depends on the device your reader is using to view the email. All graphics may or may not be displayed correctly when it comes to different devices.
Not to mention the fact that too many visual aids can actually be distracting, and you end up doing more harm than good.
According to Email On Acid, a frequently recommended guideline advises maintaining a balance of no more than 40% image coverage and a minimum of 60% text in your emails, a practice generally effective at preventing deliverability issues. However, in recent years, some email experts have proposed an 80/20 rule, emphasizing a more dominant 80% text to 20% image ratio in email content.
- Running your email marketing campaigns from a personal email account:
As an email marketer, this is perhaps the most unprofessional thing you can do. Usually, businesses use a standard platform for their email marketing. Using your own email account for this may seem to be inexpensive; however, it is the exact opposite.
Running an email marketing campaign from your personal account isn’t just tacky; it’s also pretty hard to manage. You also lose a lot of other convenient features that a professional marketing platform provides.
Trust us, if you want to effectively market to your customer base through email, it’s high time you started using a platform optimized for this purpose. Your main goal in a marketing campaign is to send targeted messages at the right times.
For this purpose, you will need a standard platform that offers viewing options, response handling, and integration. Doing so will help you edit the messages to improve the open rates and click-through rates.
