60% of consumers will subscribe to a mailing list looking for information about promotions and hope for special deals instead of 20% following a brand on social media.
Looking at the wide margin between these two platforms, it’s evident that an effective email marketing strategy would be essential to gaining new customers and growing a business.
So what makes up an effective strategy? These five elements are some of the top qualities your campaigns should have.
1. Lost the Personal Touch
The first mistake is being far too formal, using far too much marketing jargon right off the bat. If readers are greeted with these things, the entire email will simply feel like they are stuck in a bad meeting.
Another big mistake is using a one size fits all approach to email campaigns and mailing lists. Most likely, especially if your business is on the mid-large range, you have customers with varying needs.
There needs to be some variation in email design and content. Specific lists can be made, and emails in those lists can be made with tailored content dependent on the theme or subject of said list.
Both of these approaches remove any personality and personalization of the content being written. They become cold form letters that no subscriber or customer can connect with.
2. Poor Design of Email
An email should be visually interesting, but that doesn’t mean that you need to be a graphic designer to get that task done.
There is a multitude of templates available to be edited for the needs of your business, as well as drag and drop design tools and visual assets to help bring some flash to your emails.
Pieces of software like Constant Contact and Canva offer a flexible, creative way to make logos and template images to quickly use on the go. It is just as easy to change little details on the fly as you launch new campaigns.
The formatting of the email needs to be taken into consideration, as well. The world has moved into a very mobile-centric way. Compared to the 0.9 users checking their mail on their desktop, 1.7 users are doing such on their smartphones.
Checking email design for mobile devices is more important every day as the numbers reflect a huge mobile-only trend.
3. Lack of Insight/Bought List
When you purchase a mailing list, you get a collection of contacts, sure, but what understanding do you have of that audience? What do you know about their needs related to your products and services?
They may have no need at all for anything that you have to offer. You have to also realize that as you bought that contacts list, it was also sold to other people. Now all the people on that list are receiving a large number of new emails.
It could also be a case of losing touch with your customer base. You are still working with much older information than should reflect your current audience. By running off of that information, your marketing team will suffer.
4. A Lot of Talking But Nothing is Really Said
People don’t want to trudge through a master’s thesis length email to get to the point that is never really made. They want something short and simple.
Just advertising a product or service by talking it up in an email is not going to garner a lot of, if any, response. You need to offer something of value to the reader, build a relationship so that they see what they have to gain if they continue forward.
Consumers, especially online, are particularly informed and want to know more and more before committing with a business.
By proving to them what you have to offer right from the start, you prove your value and build trust. You become more human and less just a marketing machine looking to take their money.
A short email can quickly offer a wealth of information and value by being efficient and utilizing its real estate. A quick email that has value is easy to scan because the main points aren’t lost in a sea of fluff.
Not only saying too much but sending emails too often. Eventually, you will get tossed directly into the spam folder if the user hasn’t already filtered you into the trash.
You will only get to that point by consistently sending irrelevant emails and not correctly setting proper intervals for your informative, meaningful content. No more than once or twice a week is a good plan.
5. Headlines Aren’t Making News
Improper subject lines can prevent the user from even having the chance to pass the email over. Depending on the wording and structure, they could be getting filtered directly into the spam folder.
Not only do you have to worry about being attention-grabbing but also look out for particular terms and how the subject line is structured.
Some important points to keep in mind are:
- Personalization
- Keep it short but be descriptive
- Keep punctuation to a limit of 3
- Convey a sense of urgency and action
- Emojis can be used but rarely and never to replace a word
- If you do use one test, it first to make sure how it appears because they do render differently on different systems
With 33% of users opening an email simply because it had a catchy subject line, those points are things you want to get right.
Equally as important to remember is that 69% of users have reported an email as spam because it had a subpar subject line. So make sure you put a quality one on all your emails! Make sure to do A/B testing whenever you start a campaign.
This Email Marketing Strategy Certainly Isn’t Spam
Developing an effective email marketing strategy comes down to a little bit of science and a little bit of art. You need to know how to formulate a procedure around the campaign and present that slight human touch.
The process isn’t complicated, but it is nuanced. With time and attention, you will have a strong list and return on time invested, no problem!
Be sure to stop by the site for help with any content creation and management and see the blog for more content just like this!
