If you want to do well in the online arena, you need to find effective and cost-efficient ways to reach out to your target audience. And, without a doubt, email marketing is one of the most effective ways of reaching your target audience, especially for small businesses. It (read email marketing) is also one of the most cost-efficient ways of engaging with your existing and future customers. Hence, if you are a small business, it is imperative to have in place a smart email marketing strategy.
However, before you get down to formulating an effective email marketing strategy, it is vital to know how to avoid some common email marketing mistakes. To help you understand what you need to avoid, let us take you through seven email marketing mistakes that you need to avoid to get the most out of your email marketing campaign.
But before getting there, let us try to understand why email marketing is so important to businesses.
Why is email marketing so important for business?
There are reasons why email marketing should matter, especially to small businesses. Here are some of the statistics that will prove our point beyond doubt:
According to the Radicati Group, more than half the world population uses email in 2019.
Email users worldwide are projected to grow by over 4.3 billion by 2023.
In 2019, the total number of consumer and business emails sent and received every day is expected to cross 293 billion. And by 2023, the same figure is expected to grow more than 347 billion.
78% of teenagers use email despite the rise of social messaging apps. 68.62% of business professionals prefer email to communicate for business purposes.
7 email marketing mistakes businesses should avoid
If you want your email marketing campaign to be effective, you need to make sure that you avoid these email marketing mistakes:
- Don’t try to sell too hard – Email marketing is not just about selling your products or services. It is also about developing a relationship with your customers and prospects. Of course, you want to increase your sales and traffic, but you cannot achieve the desired results without developing a relationship with your customers. If your email revolves around selling your products or services, your customers will stop engaging with you. Hence, what you need is a balance between helpful content and product offers.Therefore, it is important for you to share useful and relevant content with your customers and prospects, which keeps their interests alive. For example, if you have a hardware shop, you can send a weekly newsletter to your customers with tips on how to efficiently complete various projects. In the newsletter, you can intelligently showcase relevant products that you intend to sell. What it does is it enhances your position as an industry expert among your customers and prospects, increases trust, and develops a strong relationship with them. Also, this strategy improves your open rates and boosts your conversions.
- Uninteresting subject lines – This is another email marketing mistake that you need to avoid. It is important to craft your subject line carefully. If your subject line is uninteresting, not many people will open your email. And, if your customers and prospects delete your email without opening it, all your efforts go in vain. Therefore, it is important for marketers to create an interesting subject line so that customers and prospects open your email.
Moreover, in the game of email marketing, your subject line is your first impression. And, it is needless to say that you need to create a good first impression among your customers and prospects.
Your email subject line should be conversational, personal, and creative.
- Not optimizing your email for mobile – Most of the customers use their smartphones to access their emails. It is, therefore, important that you consider mobile optimization when you email your customers.
Therefore, what you need to do is send yourself a test mail and check it across all devices to see if it is readable without any problem. You have to keep in mind that customer experience is extremely vital these days. Your emails should give your customers a great experience both on the mobile devices as well as on the desktop.
All it takes is a few minutes to perfect the format of your email, and it is worth the effort.
- Not paying attention to customer segmentation – To make your marketing effective, you need to target your audience correctly. Hence, it is important to segment your customers so that you can target them properly. To start with, you can segment your customers according to their age and gender. But it is helpful to go deeper and do behavior segmentation, which is knowing about their purchase history and interests. Behavior segmentation improves your marketing efforts because it can deliver more value to your customers.
If you cater to the needs of your customers well, you are bound to get better results.
- Not using tracking analytics – It is very important for businesses to approach their marketing campaigns scientifically. And, that is where tracking analytics come into play. Hence, for every email campaign, you should use tracking analytics.
It is, therefore, important for businesses to track delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, and conversion rate. Once you have all the relevant data in front of you, you can tweak your campaign to make it more effective.
- Not including clear calls to action – You need to make your email purposeful. Whether you are interested in selling your product or you want someone to follow you on Facebook, you should always include a clear call to action in your email. You need to be clear about what you want from your customers.
Hence, it is always advisable to include a clear call to action in your communication. And, make sure it is not complicated. You should never confuse your customers, so keep your CTA simple and uncomplicated.
- Never ignore GDPR considerations – Your email campaign should be GDPR compliant. It means that you should have proof that your customers have opted to receive your emails. If you are sending emails to those in the US, you are not required to follow or stick to these regulations, but it is always better to add an opt-in feature to your email list no matter where your recipients live.
But businesses in the UK and Europe need to be GDPR compliant. Hence, it is important to make your campaign GDPR compliant.
For an effective and sound email marketing strategy, you should get in touch with vStacks Software Solutions. We are a digital marketing company with hands-on experience of creating a smart and effective email marketing campaign for businesses, both big and small. Contact us now to reach your target audience.
