In the world of email marketing today, it’s not enough to just put emails out there and hope for the best. You need to do it right. When looking at email marketing best practices, it’s often just as useful to know what not do. To help get your email marketing working smarter, stop making these three email marketing mistakes today:
No-No #1: You don’t have a plan.
You don’t want to invest your time and money willy-nilly in emails that may or may not hit their mark with your desired audience. (Chances are they won’t considering the 144 billion emails sent day in and day out.) You’ll need a plan to separate yourself from all that noise.
The Fix:
Create a plan or get help in creating one. And not just any plan, but a well researched, well thought out email marketing strategy that maps the steps to get to your end goals.
What should your plan include? A clear explanation of how you’re going to meet your objectives, developed around a defined target audience and the concrete way(s) in which your brand is different from your competitors. In order to do that you’ll need to define your brand, your target audience, your story and, last but not least, your specific goals, e.g. $X money coming in, X% conversions, etc. Then, decide on the strategies you’re going to use and why, how you’re going to use your tactics and how they’re going to work together to showcase your brand and tell your story.
It doesn’t have to be complicated to be a good plan. Simple plans can have a lot of impact—a long as they’re researched and implemented effectively.
Once you’ve created a plan, be prepared to make adjustments. The market is constantly changing, so what works changes, too. Evaluate as you go and tweak as needed.
No-No #2: You ignore the data.
Irrelevance is one of the top reasons that customers unsubscribe from emails. Luckily, you have a lot of information at your disposal to make your email marketing more relevant. You can use that data to create better emails, that is, emails that deliver the right message to the right person at the right time with the right frequency.
The Fix:
Step away from the batch-and-blast style emails. You have a general idea of who your customers are based on past purchases and information they may have freely provided to you. Use it to create customer profiles around which you customize your email content. Break up your email list into discrete groups and tailor your messages to those groups accordingly.
Start tracking what’s working and what’s not via conversion data, engagement data, opens, clicks, purchases, bounce rates, unsubscribes and spam complaints. Once you’ve made friends with your data, tie these metrics in to your strategies and your customer journey. This may not mean you need more data, but that you need to more closely analyze the data you have, asking the right questions in order to find out who your customers are, what they need or want, when they want it and on what device. Once you’ve exhausted the usefulness of the data you’re currently collecting, then you can look for the gaps in what you know and look for ways to capture actionable data.
No-No #3: You have silo mentality.
While marketing silos allow a company to decentralize its marketing efforts by delegating specific channels to experts in each area, it also reduces the efficiency of your communications. Instead of each channel working together, they end up competing for consumers’ attention. Rather than sharing information, disparate departments and agencies perform the same or similar tasks leading to lost resources, lost time and lost money.
The Fix:
Make email part of an omnichannel marketing strategy. Integrate your email marketing messages and strategies with your other channels—your website, blog, social media, print advertisements, radio spots, speaking engagements and wherever else you seek to make contact with your audience.
Think of email as a gateway. Use it to drive traffic to your website, your blog and your social media pages. If your company is big enough to necessitate outsourced marketing or strategies spread among different departments, make certain that each department collaborates on messaging and shares info and resources. You want to be sure that brand experience is consistent everywhere potential customers interact with you.
Business owners need to be informed and engaged about what works and what doesn’t with their email marketing strategies. Take ownership of building your brand, crafting a story, putting together a campaign based on what you want your customers to do, being specific about your goals, tracking and managing your conversation rates, and optimizing your campaigns.
If you don’t want to do this, get in touch with Filament and we’ll do the heavy lifting around creating the right plan for your brand, tracking the right metrics, and optimizing your email marketing to get the results you need.
Have you gotten into some bad habits with your email marketing? What are some email marketing mistakes that you’ve made in the past? How did your metrics improve? Let us know in the comments section below.
