Email Marketing Mistakes You must Avoid
Even in this day and age of social media preponderance all evidence points to the fact that email marketing is not going away anytime soon. As per credible sources over 132 billion emails will be sent and received each day towards the end of 2017. A big majority of people start their day at the office by going through their email inbox. So if you want your target audience to know about your business and product then email marketing is still the best way to go about doing it.
But there are many pitfalls in this area which you should steer clear of in order to get the best results. Your marketing email does not work like your personal email that you send to friends and family. There are some ground rules that you need to follow if you expect your customers to peruse your email and take the desired action.
# Choose your subject line carefully
This is naturally the first thing that any customer will see about your email. So choose your email subject line diligently. Overtly promotional words or subject lines that are ‘too good to be true’ are summarily discarded by most users. Nobody has the time to look into the contents of the email if the title is not convincing enough. Make it a practice to write a couple of email subject lines everyday and choose the ones that are the best on an ongoing basis. The subject should be such that it should give the impression to the customer that you are genuinely here to help them.
# Have an upper cap on emails blasted
Just because you have the email addresses of customers does not give you the permission to incessantly pester them with unlimited emails. That way your emails will in due course be labelled as spam and will end up in the junk folder. Thus it is very imperative that you send only a limited number of emails each week and strictly stick to this limit. It also gives you enough time to decide on the subject line, body content of the email in order to make the most impact on your prospective customers.
# Quality of your content is crucial
It is highly detrimental to the prospects of your business if all you do is blast promotional emails. You like it or not, nobody wants anything to be sold to them. This is the inspiration that is the foundation for inbound marketing and email marketing is very much a part and parcel of inbound marketing. Help the customers in making an informed buying decision. Sales will naturally follow if the customers trust you and your content. The emotional connect with the customers is very crucial in any business transaction and no customers will buy anything until they begin to trust the brand.
# Get permission and segment customers
The best way to have your email marketing list is to build it yourself organically instead of spending big sums of money on some ready-made list. This way you know what customers want and how to approach them. Have opt-ins in your website, blog and all customer touchpoints so that customers willingly submit their email address to you.
The next step is to segment the users based on where they are in the marketing funnel, their predilections, demographics and such other crucial data that can make or break your marketing efforts depending on how you approach it. It helps to stay on top of customer demands if you know in advance what they are expecting so that you can tailor-make the email content as per their exacting requirements.
# Design for the mobile form factor
Your emails are more likely to be read on a mobile device than any other device in today’s world where time is a luxury for most people. So if they are not happy with the mobile responsiveness of your email then do not expect them to take any favourable action. Keep your content short and sweet so that you can get to the point immediately. Clearly state what you want the customers to do once they are done reading the email. Have your call to action in the body of the email clearly. Emails which have social sharing buttons have a much higher click-through rate than the one’s which do not accord this privilege.