Email marketing is tricky business. It can make or break your brand sooner than you’d imagine. However, most digital marketers find themselves in the soup when their sincere email marketing efforts fail to bear fruit.
Most probably, you’re making one of the many common mistakes. In this guide, I’ll help you figure out why your email marketing jet is not taking off like you want it to.
You’re sending way too many of them, or worse still, too few.
Whereas blitzing your subscribers’ mailbox with a marketing email every other day is a sure shot way to forcing them to unsubscribe, it’s equally bad if you just don’t send emails often enough. The marketer dilemma, then, becomes — how often is too much, how often is too few, and how often is just right?
In its report titled “The Ideal Email Frequency,” Campaign Monitor distils its analysis from two billion emails! The key findings:
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Email sending frequency impacts the open and unsubscribe rates.
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First email campaigns invariably attract highest open rates, and unique open rates increase to a certain extent with subsequent campaigns.
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With subsequent campaigns, however, unsubscribe rates increase.
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After the sixth campaign, almost 50 percent subscribers would have opened at least one email, and 13 percent people would have clicked.
Soon enough, it becomes a question of comparing the cost of subsequent email campaigning with the value of the incremental unique clicks you get.
Once every two weeks is the sweet spot in terms of getting more unique clicks, without having subscribers unsubscribing because of excess. However, most marketers send emails twice or thrice every week. You know better now.
You’re saying too many things in too many words.
Take it from me; emails are not the equivalent of letters, so don’t word them so. Considering how most subscribers see emails on smartphones, the time a marketer has to make the email talk is not much at all. It can be a huge blunder to include too many messages in a single email, to use too many words to deliver the message, or not to have a clear action point for the user
Instead, focus on a crisp and concrete call to action, and say it aloud in the fewest possible words. Before you send out that email, evaluate as to whether it captures the user’s attention and gets the message across in two seconds or less.
Here’s a terrific example of an email campaign by Bonobos. It’s hard to get any crisper and clearer.
It’s super clear from their email — the user just needs to click on his size to save. Done.
You just don’t know your audience.
It’s tough to figure out how many email marketing campaigns fail just because the messages are not attuned to the target audiences. It’s critical for marketers to know their audience and appreciate its needs at different stages of interaction. Instead of continuing to shoot in the dark, use these tips to align your messaging with your audience.
Segmentation: Once you’re done with a couple of campaigns,…
