Five common email marketing mistakes

Any marketer or business owner will agree that email marketing is a fantastic way to reach out to existing and prospective customers.

Not only is your potential reach absolutely huge – in 2017, 3.7 billion people were using email and this is expected to grow to 4.1 billion by 2021, it boasts a much higher ROI compared to other marketing methods. According to DMA and Demand Metric, emails have an average ROI of 122% which is 4 times higher than other marketing formats including social media, direct mail and paid search – https://www.statista.com/statistics/255080/numb er-of-e-mail-users-worldwide/

If you’re already sold on the benefits of email marketing, chances are that you’ve already been sending out campaigns to your database. If you’re struggling to get people to open your communications however or your click-through rates are consistently low, you could be making one (or all!) of these common mistakes.

You’re sending unsolicited emails

It’s illegal to send unsolicited emails and the introduction of GDPR (http://www.itpro.co.uk/it-legislation/27814/what-is-gdpr-everything-you-need-to-know)

on the 25^th of May 2018 will mean that the laws surrounding customers’ personal data will be even tighter. Aside from being illegal, spamming potential customers is actually a waste of your time.

After all, if someone hasn’t expressed an interest in your company, the chances of them opening your communications are incredibly slim. Not only are you going to get low open rates, sending unsolicited emails can be bad for your company’s reputation and if people, complain, it will also affect the deliverability of future messages.

You’re sending without testing

No matter how many times you’ve checked your email, always send a test to yourself and at least one other person because there are many things that can go wrong. From broken links and formatting issues to images not loading correctly and spelling and grammar mistakes, all of these things can distract users from your message.

Your subject lines are boring

The one thing that’s going to make people open your emails is your subject line. With everyone’s inboxes being bombarded with dozens of emails every day, you need to ensure that yours stands out.

To prevent people from putting your communications straight into their trash folder, you need to get creative with your subject lines. ‘Our newsletter’ isn’t going to generate much interest for example. If however, you use your subject line to focus on a topic you’ve discussed in your newsletter, this will dramatically increase the chances of it being opened. This will be even more so the case if you can make your content topical. Something like ‘How is GDPR going to affect your business?’ or ‘Everything marketers need to know about GDPR’ is relevant to a lot of people at the moment and you will therefore pique their interest, making them more likely to open your email.

Your content doesn’t offer value

In an ideal world, you want your emails to result in more sales and the only way you’re going to achieve this is if your content offers real value to your readers.

You can do this by focusing on building a relationship with your customers rather than trying to sell to them all the time. A great way to do this is by offering something within every email you send out. For example, how to guides, a round-up of all the latest news in your industry or top tips.

Once people are familiar with your brand and they trust you, then you can start promoting your product or service.

You’re not using data

 Do you know what happens to your emails once you’ve sent them out? Are people opening them? Are they clicking on the links? Do they visit your website as a direct result of your communication?

Not being armed with this information can be incredibly costly to your marketing campaigns. Knowing the content that generally performs well and what tends to fall flat means that you can tailor your communications to the likes and dislikes of your readers.

The platform you use to send out your emails should provide you with information such as opens, clicks and unsubscribes. If you don’t have the time or knowledge to analyse your data, get in contact with a digital marketing company like Big Group Performance who will be able to do this for you.

They will be able to help you identify the key metrics you need to monitor the performance of your business as well as reveal key business intelligence.