Ever wondered why your email campaigns don’t perform the way they should?
Your emails are incredibly creative, and your product is great, but it just doesn’t generate the engagement or ROI you want.
Well, it might be a few small mistakes you are making that are dragging your performance down.
While every marketer keeps an eye on the most obvious mistakes, most miss the minuscule blunders that quietly do the most damage.
In this blog, we talk about 5 mistakes you can avoid making in your email marketing campaigns to get higher ROIs.
1. Not Knowing Your Target Audience
First things first: who are you trying to market to? Before you send out your emails, figure out who you want to connect with.
Take your time, do your research, and create an ideal buyer persona based on the information you find.
Ask yourself questions like:
- Who are they?
- What are their pain points?
- What kind of content can engage them?
You can start by assuming the information you don’t know yet and fill in the details as you gather more data. This will help you create content that gets more relevant with passing time.
While you are at it, remember that not every member of your target audience is at the same place in their buyer’s journey.
Some are ready to make a purchase, while others are just discovering your brand. So, make sure that you create content for different stages.
Otherwise, your email might come across as irrelevant even if you send it to the right audience.
2. Sending One-Off Campaigns Instead Of Automating Flows
Are you still relying on blasting offers, promotions, or informational content manually? If so, you are falling behind.
The truth is – manually-run campaigns can’t make sure that your emails find your audience at the right stage of their buyers’ journey. This causes irrelevance and disengagement.
Automating flows can easily help you overcome this issue. It sends out messages based on context, user actions, or stage, and helps you drive better results.
The numbers support the statement, with automated emails generating 320% more revenue when compared to non-automated ones.
You can incorporate the following flows to increase engagement and generate more ROI –
- Welcome Emails – To welcome any new subscriber
- Value-driven Follow-Ups – To introduce your company or the product and reinforce the value you offer.
- Lead Nurturing Campaigns – To keep your leads engaged for a longer period of time.
- Abandoned Cart Reminders – To gently coax your subscribers into completing the purchase.
3. Sending Out Irrelevant Mails
Ready to send your marketing email? Just stop for a moment and ask yourself this: “Do they need the content I am sending?”.
Let’s look at the numbers. On average, people send and receive about 126 business emails each day.
This means decision-makers are hit with a barrage of emails every day. If you aren’t useful, you are discarded.
Email marketing is about cutting through the noise by building the right connections. And sending out irrelevant emails is a far cry from it.
Not only do you risk annoying the readers who might not open your emails or report you as spam, but you might also end up dragging down your marketing metrics, such as open rate and click-to-open rates.
These poor metrics go beyond burning your present campaign. The low engagement shows that you send out irrelevant emails.
The result? Increase in the chances of your emails ending up in the spam folder. This results in your reputation as a marketer taking a hit while also speeding up your campaign’s demise.
You can easily stop this disaster from unfolding by:
- Segmenting your email lists according to purchase history, buyers’ intent, journey stage, and other such attributes. This will help you ensure that the email you send is always relevant.
- Deeply cleaning your email list regularly. Old and erroneous email lists don’t just sit idle in your database. They actively bring down engagement and harm your ROI.
- Incorporating personalization in your email marketing by utilizing available user data and offering the right solutions and recommendations. You can also consider deploying AI-driven personalization to make things more efficient and get better results.
4. Not Abiding By Data Compliance Laws
Thinking about ignoring those terms and conditions? Think again! Not towing in line with the data privacy laws can be a very expensive mistake to make.
Not only does it jeopardize your reputation as a marketer, but it might also get you embroiled in legal battles.
Here’s what you can do to avoid the hassle:
- Keep a clear one-click unsubscribe button at the end of every email.
- Your email address should be legitimate, and the readers should be able to identify your company from it. You must avoid misleading your subscribers.
- Your subject lines should reflect the content of your email.
- Ensure that the data you use was obtained with explicit consent.
- Keep yourself educated about the local laws if you are planning to go international.
5. Ignoring Or Misunderstanding Email Analytics
Your email analytics tell the story of your marketing campaign – the ups, the downs, the successes, and the failures.
It allows you to find out what is working for your campaign and what isn’t. Ignoring your email analytics or not reading them correctly can ruin your email marketing campaign in no time.
- Focusing Too Much On Open Rates
Once upon a time in email marketing, open rates were considered to be a reliable metric. Not anymore!
Here’s why:
- Open rates are measured by a tiny, invisible tracking pixel. If the recipient has blocked images, the open won’t register. This makes it difficult to track the right number of opens.
- Many service providers preload the entire email content before it has even been opened by the user. This inflates the open numbers and makes it difficult for marketers to measure engagement.
- As changes prioritizing privacy keep rising, many marketers have noticed an unusually high open rate. This can mislead marketers about the efficiency of the marketing campaigns.
Instead of open rates, you can measure metrics like:
- Click-Through Rates
- Click-To-Open Rates
- Conversion Rates
They will give you a better understanding of the performance of your email marketing campaign.
- Ignoring Spam Complaints And Bounce Rates
As a marketer, you can’t afford to ignore spam complaints and bounce rates. These metrics can ruin not just your current campaign but the ones that are to come by showing you as an untrustworthy marketer.
- Spam complaints show that your emails are reaching the wrong audience or breaking compliance laws.
- High bounce rates show that you are marketing using a subpar email list. This can get you blacklisted and tarnish your reputation.
Ensure that your email list is in line with the data privacy framework before running your marketing campaign. You must also clean your email list regularly.
How Can Avoiding These Mistakes Help Your Email Marketing Campaign?
You know the worst part about these mistakes? They are small, meaning they are missed even by seasoned marketers many a time.
When these bungles aren’t caught in time, they quietly ruin your marketing performance and prevent you from running effective email marketing campaigns.
Here are the benefits of avoiding these errors:
- They generate higher engagement by ensuring relevance.
- They ensure that your emails land in your target audience’s inbox.
- You get more ROI and conversions by always delivering high-quality and relevant content to your customers.
- Cleaning your email list to remove disengaged and error-riddled contacts and keeping only invested ones ensures a high-quality email list in the long run.
To Wrap Up
Email marketing can produce an impressive ROI of $36 for every dollar spent – but only when it is done right.
When you avoid these small errors and run your email marketing campaign with high-quality content and a good email marketing strategy, it can yield absolutely spectacular results.
Now that you know what to look out for, go right ahead and attain the email marketing results of your dreams! Happy marketing!
FAQs
When should I send my marketing emails?
You should send your emails on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays, between 10-12 and 1-3 PM. These timings generate the most engagement.
Avoid sending out emails on Mondays when your target audience is having Monday blues or Fridays when they just want to wind up and start the weekend.
What is the optimum length of a marketing email?
Your marketing email should be around 50 to 125 words, while your subject lines should be about 28 to 50 characters long. Ensure that your subject lines are catchy and relevant. Also, don’t forget to add CTAs to every marketing message.
