E-mail marketing works – if you do it right. Unfortunately, there are lots of opportunities to get off track. Here are five of the most common e-mail marketing mistakes. See which ones you’re making and take the necessary steps to make changes that will make your e-mail marketing more effective.
- Having No Patience For The Process
Maybe it’s because e-mail marketing works so well that businesses expect it to be a one-and-done magic bullet. It isn’t. If you want to reap the rewards of e-mail marketing, you have to do the time. E-mail is both a nurturing tool and a lead generator. Because e-mails can easily be shared, those leads you’re nurturing can forward your e-mail on to others. This means your e-mails serve double duty, helping you build qualified leads as well as getting new ones, but it is a process.
- Failure To Choose Your Words Wisely
With e-mail marketing, if you don’t choose your words very carefully, you’ll end up identified as a spammer. Not what you’re going for. Spam filters have gotten very sophisticated, looking at subject lines, the sender’s e-mail address, and the content of the e-mail. Avoid using spam triggering words like “free,” “cash,” “quote,” “visit our website,” and “save” in your subject lines like the plague. Trigger words like these cause problems and increase the chances of your e-mail getting caught in a SPAM trap. By avoiding these words in your e-mail subject lines, you increase your chances of making it past SPAM filters.
- Over Designing Your E-mails
When you put a lot of design into your e-mails, you could cause viewing problems for your prospects because of the size of the file(s). Also, if an e-mail is too busy, your prospects may miss your message. Believe it or not, plain text works really well. However, if you are going to implement some design into your e-mail campaign, make sure you keep it fairly simple. You can always test plain text versus a designed e-mail and see which works best for you.
- Not Maintaining Your Mailing List
You have built your e-mail list of prospects who have chosen to opt-in. That means they want to hear from you. (Of course, those who don’t will opt-out and should be removed from your list. This is an effective way to remove prospects who aren’t going to result in a sale, allowing you to focus more time and energy on those who are.) A big mistake here is to just leave your list as is and continue to send the same message to everyone on your list. Take a look at your list and see who has been engaged – clicking through, filling out forms, etc. – and which people on your list have just been holding a place on your list. Those “seat holders” need some special attention in the form of a targeted campaign from you to get them re-engaged in your product or service. Analytics is your friend and can really help you work your list to your best advantage, but you have to be paying attention to make it work.
- Disregarding Analytics
One of the best things about e-mail marketing is that you can get really insightful feedback directly from your prospects almost instantly. If you study your analytics, the results will tell you what’s working and what isn’t. For example, just looking at your e-mail open rates is a very helpful comparative metric. It shows you which subject line your prospects responded to best and which ones were bombs. Just this one simple thing allows you to better construct your messages to more effectively speak to your prospects.
These are just five common mistakes that are easy to make. Thankfully, they are also pretty easy to fix. Address these five areas of your e-mail marketing and you’re sure to develop successful campaigns.
Digital Media Insider 