6 Reasons Why Your Email Marketing Isn’t Working
Email marketing has been around almost as long as there have been emails, and with good reason. As far as digital marketing goes, this is one of the most effective ways of connecting with new leads, nurturing them, and turning them into customers. For B2Bs looking to generate more leads, SEO, email marketing, and social media are the three best performing sources, providing them with approximately 14%, 13%, and 12% of new leads respectively.
The good news doesn’t stop here. Email marketing campaigns, if implemented correctly, were shown to produce a massive 4,000% ROI. That’s like earning back $40 for every dollar invested. Some 59% of marketers say that email is their biggest source of ROI. Also, 83% of B2B companies use e-newsletters as part of their content marketing program, and 93% use email to distribute content. Interestingly, 40% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success.
Now, if you can’t say the same thing about your own email campaign, chances are you’re making one of these common email marketing mistakes. Here is what you should look out for.
Recipient Unknown
For many companies, B2B or B2C, email marketing is nothing more than a shot in the dark. When things work out, it’s almost always a matter of luck. This should never be your approach. If you’ve been diligently sending out email newsletters to your subscribers, but your sales don’t show it, chances are your message wasn’t relevant to the audience.
The need for marketers to understand their audience can never be overstated. They should do their homework before starting their email communications, which means developing buyer personas by clearly defining their target audience. This profile includes the target audience’s needs, preferences, pain points, responsibilities, challenges, communication preferences, etc.
Also, keep in mind that it’s not enough to recognize traits common to your entire mailing list. You will have to identify the preferences and characteristics of different segments within it. This is particularly important for B2Bs, as their accounts may contain multiple decision-makers. As such, you will need to develop buyer personas for each type of decision-maker.
Weak Personalization
Similar to the point above, email personalization plays a crucial role in business-to-business communications. Marketers can’t afford to rely on a one-size-fits-all approach. Statistics show that the open rate of an email newsletter with a personalized message will be closer to 19% as opposed to just 13% without any personalization.
Segmentation will play a crucial role as you can market to leads and customers based on similar interests, values, and preferences. This will also help with your email design and stimulate the right triggers in customers’ minds.
Good marketing automation platforms will go beyond just your customer’s name. Every interaction will be based on up-to-date customer data and dynamic content from the customer’s past behavior and interactions. In fact, 65% of marketers rated dynamic email content as their most effective personalization tactic, doing wonders for the conversion rate.
Poor Email Copy and Subject Line
Another issue that may undermine your marketing strategy is poor email copy. Aside from content personalization, you also need to pay close attention to your subject line. If this isn’t clear, attractive, and engaging enough, it will fail to catch people’s attention and will never be opened.
Keep in mind that the average office worker receives over 120 emails per day. If you want opens and clicks, you’ll need to make sure that your emails receive more than a passing glance. Avoid all-caps, excessive punctuation marks, and misleading/vague phrases.
Work to get your message across quickly by using as few words as possible. In email marketing, always follow the five-second rule. Make sure that the recipient will figure out what your email is about in five seconds or less after opening it. Don’t make them look for it because most won’t.
People will also want to know who is sending them this email. A generic return email address, a no-reply address, or an unsigned email will never denote a real person. If anything, it screams of borderline spammy marketing. The return email address should provide all the clarity the recipient needs to understand who is writing to them. To make your email even more personal, you can include a photo when appropriate.
The Call-to-Action
Another critical element of your email copy is your call to action (CTA). You don’t want people just to read your emails. You also want them to take a specific action. As such, the CTA is among the most important elements of your email copy. You can’t expect an effective email campaign if people fall short of doing something with what you sent them. Your prospects also need to click-through and convert, not just read and move on.
Email CTAs usually tend to fail because there are too many of them. This leaves subscribers confused about what and where to click. Also, you should look to use words like “Try,” “Get,” or “Click here,” but stay away from words like “Submit,” because they tend to drive people away. Pick one main objective you want to achieve via the readers’ action per email and highlight that clearly and plainly.
Design and Display Errors
You will also want your marketing emails to have the right form and function. Over 71% of recipients will immediately delete an email if there are any display issues. This means you will have to focus on mobile-friendliness since over 90% of people nowadays read their emails on mobile devices.
If your email isn’t easy to read on a smartphone, you’re already losing most of your prospects’ attention. To balance images and text, and provide for an overall positive experience, MailChimp recommends the 80:20 text to image ratio. That’s 80% text and 20% image in your emails.
Your Email is Spam!
Most mail servers today, including Gmail, have pretty advanced spam filters. If you’ve been doing everything else by the book and still can’t see any meaningful results, chances are your emails are ending up in the spam folder, never to be seen again. There are, however, several things you can do to reduce this risk.
Avoid using words like offer, promo, free, buy, or hurry. Spam filters have been trained to look for excessive numbers of these words since they’re often used in phishing emails. Second, never attach files in your marketing emails. Instead, provide a link that readers can click on to download the file.
Know that some spam filters will also flag certain email campaigns if they’ve received spam emails from that IP address in the past. This means that your IP address can influence whether or not your emails will be considered spam or not. To avoid this happening to your IP address, don’t send emails in bulk and preferably use automation software. They’ll deliver your emails through their servers, not yours.
Review your email performance reports religiously. Test emails with images and without to see if you get better deliverability and open rates. Test short form and long form versions of your email copy. If you are using a sales automation platform like reply.io or outreach, test the impact of tracking email clicks has on your open rates. We have seen as high as a 5% drop in open rates when we track email link clicks. The spam software can detect whether or not you are tracking this activity and is less likely to deliver your email. Remember if you can’t get into inboxes, then no one’s going to see your emails, open your emails, or click on your emails. [bctt tweet=”Getting into the inbox requires testing and lots of it these days.”]
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