Email marketing is not dead. According to Opt In Monster, “With a potential return on investment of up to 4400%, email marketing remains the best way to attract and retain customers.” Further stats show that, “For starters, we send 102.6 trillion emails every year. And the numbers keep going up, with 126.7 trillion expected to be sent by 2022. The average email subscriber receives 13 commercial emails a day.” Email marketing remains one of the top ways to stay front of mind to your customers and attract new subscribers to your tribe. So why this misconception that email marketing is dead?
The biggest reasons that people have shied away from email and switch to other platforms is that they’ve been doing email wrong! There are mistakes to be made with this platform and it can be one of the more time consuming marketing tools available to you. Here are 3 mistakes business owners make when using email to grow their business.
- Selling too hard and too often!
I can’t stress enough that this is the biggest mistake when it comes to email or really any platform you choose to market on. Users are bombarded with ads and offers on a constant basis from large retailers and big box suppliers. Do you want to be just another voice yelling in a whirlwind cacophony of options? No! You’ve got to stand out. Your emails have to draw the reader in, provide value and lead them down a path to the buying decision, and for them to make that buying decision with you. Email marketing should be used as an educational arm of your business. Take the opportunity to talk with your current customers, attract new prospects by providing value in your emails in the form of content. This can be videos, blogs, or simply nurturing campaigns to keep you top of mind.
- All the technical errors!
There could be whole articles written, and maybe I will, on the technical pitfalls of email marketing. From poor segmentation, not optimizing your emails for mobile, ignoring opt-in regulations and writing poor subject lines, you have to make sure you have a handle on all of these aspects of your email marketing game before you can even worry about whether your content is resonating with your audience. It does you no good as a business owner to write beautiful emails if they’re not even being delivered to the right audience, in the right cadence at the right time. Make sure you learn the skills necessary to hurdle these technical aspects of email marketing or work with a professional to get you setup and in position for success.
- Neglecting Analytics!
This comes up alot in conversations with business owners. Are my emails being delivered, who’s reading them, is this a good open rate? All great questions and ones which can be answered by connecting your email marketing platform to your Google Analytics and your website or landing pages. I see this many times, where there are breaks in the chain of communication between tools and business owners lack the visibility they need to make better decisions about investment in their email marketing. Not enough work is done to clean up data in their database to get an accurate read on segments of customers to make clear assessments about the behavior of their audience. All of these factors contribute to inaccurate reporting, not solving to one challenge at a time and lead to abandonment of campaigns before even letting them mature and provide real value to the business and the consumer. Make sure you focus on analytics, what you want to accomplish and who and how you want to market before getting started with an email marketing campaign!
If you have questions about email marketing, paid ads, social media, or digital marketing, reach out to me at john@bluecomet.media. I look forward to helping you reach your target customers more effectively in the digital space!
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