Tomi Saikkonen, Negosentro | Considering almost everyone checks his or her emails multiple times a day, there is no denying that email marketing can be one of the most significant ways to reach your target audience.
However, as people’s inboxes get more and more cluttered, for your email marketing strategy to bring results, it has to be done right.
Here are the five costliest ways you’re doing email marketing wrong.
1. Sending irrelevant content
There is a reason that people opted to give you their email address – they are genuinely interested in your business and what you have to say!
Therefore, you need to be emailing them content that they are actually going to want to read and engage with. Even if you are spending a reasonable sum of money on producing high-quality emails, if they are irrelevant to the recipient, then at some point they are going to opt out as quickly as they signed up.
To avoid this, you should be segmenting your readers and then tailoring the message according to the group they are in. Invest in marketing automation tools to take your ability to communicate with each segment to the next level.
2. Making false promises
Just as in real life, you (hopefully) don’t make false promises. You don’t want to do this in your email marketing campaigns, either; the emails should only be filled with the truth.
It is far better to underpromise and then overdeliver than vice versa.
If, in your email marketing campaigns, you are touting your business for its high-quality standards, then you need to back up your statements or it could make you look silly and lose your customers – an awfully costly mistake.
3. Letting the haters dictate your email approach
With everything in life, you can’t let the haters dictate what you are doing. Once you have come up with an email strategy, you need to stick to the plan and not give into the urge to pull back on sending essential emails.
For example, if you decide to run a promotion over a short period, you are going to be sending as many as two emails a day. Just because a couple of people reply and say “Stop selling to me,” it does not mean you should internalize that feedback in an unhealthy way. Certainly, don’t second guess your strategy.
Instead, continue on with the current approach and then reflect on the effects of the campaign after it has ended. Otherwise, you are going to ruin the plan you have already spent time and resources on.
4. Working with the wrong data
In 2018, no marketing strategy is complete without big data. The only way to ensure that you are on the right marketing path is to utilize customer data to determine the perception of your perfect customer.
Once you have done this, you are in a better place to target them.
This will backfire if you are working with bad data, as it may mean you are targeting the wrong audience and netting zero return on your investment. Talk about a costly mistake.
Take the time to review your big data processes and to make sure that you are collecting and analyzing the data in the most thorough and appropriate ways.
Next, when starting a new email marketing campaign, consider starting small and then steadily scaling your efforts based on the feedback. This way, if your email marketing campaign doesn’t perform the way you thought it would, you can (potentially) drop it or roll it back and go back to the drawing board without wasting too many resources.
5. Launching email blasts that are too aggressive
Email marketing can produce a substantial return on your initial investment, as long as you execute it correctly. However, forgetting to segment your audience is a surefire way of messing it up.
In order to maintain a high relevancy score, you need to be effectively separating your list into different groups.
Additionally, no matter which list you are emailing, you don’t want to approach them in a spammy way. Not only will this instantly lose you subscribers, but if they start reporting these aggressive email blasts as spam, you could find yourself suspended from your newsletter platform.
In fact, many experts say that if even 2 percent of people report your emails as spam, you may have a problem.
Obviously, that is quite a severe case. But it is indeed something to keep in mind when crafting your timeline and topics.
You also don’t want to be spammy on social media. Use marketing automation for social media to ensure you are posting at the most effective times for your followers.
What email marketing mistakes has your firm made? How did you learn from them? What do you know now that you wished you knew then? Let us know in the comments below.
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AUTHOR BIO
Tomi Saikkonen is the Vice President of Liana Technologies, Middle East. Just like you Tomi is fascinated by the possibilities of digital marketing and technology. He actively seeks out ways to help businesses and organizations across industries to improve their digital marketing ROI.
