SIX REASONS YOUR EMAIL MARKETING FAILS
You can t take a one-size-fits-all approach to your email marketing and expect good results. Email marketing can have wide-reaching impact on the way that your brand is perceived by the audience, and not always in a good way. There are plenty of ways that your last email might have turned your audience off. We ve compiled the six pitfalls most likely to waylay your email marketing campaign, and how to avoid falling into them. 1. You re not ready to do the work. Email can have massive return on investment for your brand if done properly. There are nearly limitless upsides available to the gains in audience and, ultimately, sales; however, if you re not ready to put in the work, nothing can sink your email marketing faster than a few bad sends. If you re just slapping something together to get an email out without any planning or thought behind what message you re pushing out, your email is sunk before it s started. Just as bad is having a great first send, and then doing nothing after it because you re not prepared. Attracting audience attention is wonderful, but if you can t follow up with strong sends after the first email, all that hard work has gone wasted. Taking the time to put together a tactics plan before you begin writing your content can go a long way toward making sure that you not only have a good idea of what you re trying to accomplish, but also how you re going to keep your email marketing plan going after your first send. 2. You re not segmenting your sends. Chances are, your audience is pretty varied. Unless your brand is incredibly specific, your audience is made up of people across the demographic spectrum. Not only do they represent various portions of populace, but their interests are just as varied. You wouldn t send an email targeting just the women in your audience to everyone on your mailing list and expect it to be well received. This is what you re sending if you re not segmenting your email lists and sending different emails to different lists based on their interests.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH You can t take a one-size-fits-all approach to your email marketing and expect good results. At best, one small segment that the email reaches may be interested, and at worst, the vast majority of your audience will be turned off to your brand s message. 3. You ve written a book, not an email When was the last time you read an entire email from a brand, top to bottom? Most people don t have the attention span to read the entirety of a Facebook status update, never mind a long email from your brand. If you ve written more than 200-250 words for the body of your email, it s likely too long. Should you want to provide the reader the opportunity to read more on their own, providing links to those resources is a great way to drive traffic, but don t expect them to sit through your treatise on just how awesome your brand is. Easily digested interesting copy should make up the majority of the body copy of your email. Provide follow up information via links. Keep it simple. 4. You left out the call to action. If your audience doesn t know what they re supposed to do with the information your brand is providing, how can your email be a success? The audience needs a clear call to action to make sure that they can take the action that you want them to. Are you announcing new products? Are you having a sale? Is there crucial information you need the audience to do something with? Good content is the first step, but after that, the audience needs to know what you d like them to do. A clear call to action that benefits both you and the audience should be front and center in your email marketing.
There is little to no chance that your audience will open your emails, and less chance that they ll actually take an action if you only sell to them. 5. You re just selling... and only selling People get a lot of email. Quite a bit, when you stop and think about it. You re asking your audience to stop and take the time to read your email and hopefully take an action that you d like them to take. There is little to no chance that your audience will open your emails, and less chance that they ll actually take an action if you only sell to them. If your emails are the equivalent of a local used car commercial, your audience is going to grow bored fast. You have to provide something useful to the audience. Now this is obviously not to say you can t sell in your email marketing. After all, that s really the basic point. But you have to provide value alongside your selling. Offering good content, great value or a sale along with your pitch makes it exponentially more likely that your audience will be receptive to your pitch. 6. You don t understand your audience because you re not listening. Looking at your email s performance is an important part of your email marketing plan. You need to understand if your emails are not working, and you can t know that without paying attention to the analytics behind your marketing efforts. Seeing what articles perform well within a send can provide you with valuable information on what your audience is interested in. Your emails are being opened but not garnering any click throughs calls for a different change of tactics than your emails not being opened at all. Knowing this allows you to adapt your tactics to adjust to what your audience is interested in hearing about from your brand. You ignore the information that your audience provides through analytics at your own risk. Follow these six steps, and your email marketing campaign has a much better chance of survival in the wilds of your audience s inbox!
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