If you’ve spent a ton of time crafting and designing your marketing emails, you’ll likely find it disheartening to see very few subscribers opening and clicking your emails. You might even be wondering, what is wrong with my emails? What do I do?
The answer may be nothing: Maybe you are doing everything right. It’s totally normal if some of your emails are getting ignored.
Why?
Because, an estimated 269 billion emails are sent each day worldwide. And, an average person receives 122 emails per day. You can’t expect people to check each and every email.
Source – Radicati
But, if majority of your emails are ending up in trash bin, the chances are high that you must be making few mistakes with your email marketing.
Since as a marketer email is one of the most powerful tool you have to communicate, you should leave no room for mistakes. Luckily, it’s easy to fix most mistakes if you can identify them. That’s why I have put together this list of 7 not so common email marketing mistakes that most marketers make and how to fix them. Let’s get started.
1. You have not updated your email marketing strategy since the dawn of email
Clearly a lot has changed in email marketing in last few years, and many marketers are still catching up. It’s no longer enough to have a huge email list. It’s not enough to have an enticing offer. It’s not enough to address your recipients by their first name. And it’s not enough to have an email marketing strategy in place – unless you have an updated one.
Now, I’m pretty confident that every marketer know how important it’s to improve their email marketing strategy. However, there are very few who know how to create a good one – as is not an easy task. Here’s how: This is how you create a powerful email marketing strategy.
Remember the return on investment for marketing emails can be phenomenal – if you have a good strategy in place.
2. You are not leveraging the power of AI when crafting subject lines
Inboxes are cluttered. There are so many brands out there bombarding the emails in the recipient’s inbox —how can you possibly stand out? Fortunately for you, a lot of them does not know how to entice recipients to open their emails. That’s the reason dozens of marketing emails normally end up sitting in the recipients inbox. If you can create subject line that capture your recipient attention, you can get the upper hand.
Now the question is how to do that?
Well, AI can do the trick for you. Artificial intelligence can help you write better subject lines based on data. As it can analyze thousands of subject lines for you in minutes, and use the insights to craft one that your recipient’s can’t resist. For a human to craft 1000 of subject lines and gauge the efficacy of them, is impossible. Only machine can do that.
There’s no way to predict how much attention your subject line will get, but you have a much better chance of earning attention by using an AI-powered tool. According to a study by Phrasee, AI-powered subject lines are 95% more effective than those written by humans.
3. You target engaged and unengaged subscribers with the same email copy
Most marketers have already segmented their recipients based on their level of engagement, if you haven’t you should. But there are very few marketers who are actually creating different copies for their high engagers and low engagers. Don’t make this mistake. You can’t expect returns from your marketing emails if you communicate with engaged and somewhat engaged subscribers in the same manner.
I know creating different copies for different segments takes time and money. But the payoff will be great. Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%.
4. Your segmenting strategy is limited to demographics
The more tailored to its audience an email is, the higher its open and click-through rate will be. And we all know, segmenting is imperative to send targeted emails. But for most marketers their segmentation strategy ends up at demographics. Try to expand it.
One effective way to segment your user base is through their behavior. How often they open and click on your emails, what type of emails they click on, how often they purchase from you etc. This, in turn, will help you understand how often you should send marketing emails to them and what type of emails should you send to them.
Let’s say you have a subscriber who opened your promotional email once but didn’t clicked on it. Don’t flood that subscriber with similar emails; they’ll be more likely to ignore them or unsubscribe from your email list.
On the other hand, if you have a subscriber who often check your emails and take action — especially if the emails are relevant — you can send more emails to them. By leveraging behavioral data you can improve your email engagement and leaves no money on the table.
5. Your marketing emails are not interactive
You can’t expect to get good returns from your email marketing if you aren’t making it easy for recipients to take action. Think about how can you make it super easy and quick for subscribers to act on your email? Well, you can create interactive emails.
Now before we go further lets define what is interactive email?
It’s an email that allow recipients to interact with the brand without leaving the inbox. Here’s a definition from Smart Insights, “These interactive emails are now being dubbed “mailable microsites,” and the name fits perfectly. These emails act just like a micro website where users can move from “page to page” using tab and radio buttons to traverse the content and even convert directly within the email.”
The ability to directly make a purchase from the email without leaving the email itself and without the recipient needing to click through to a website can make buying process super quick, and will boost sales for the brands that embrace interactivity.
6. Your email frequency is not right
I know you must have heard it number of times that getting the frequency right is very important for your email marketing success. But it bears repeating as it’s the biggest mistake most marketers make – they either overestimate or underestimate the frequency with which their subscribers want to hear from them.
Now the question is how often should send emails to get maximum engagement? Well, there’s no magic one-size-fits-all number that leads to the best results. But here’s what you can do: segment your email list based on the engagement – highly engaged subscribers, not so engaged subscribers, unengaged subscribers.
Test to understand what is right for each segment, and determine an optimal email frequency for each segment that ensures engagement but doesn’t hurt your conversions. Also, do leverage the power of data to make your marketing emails contextual and engaging.
7. Your marketing emails are generic
People are already bombarded with more email than they can handle, and your generic messages and completely irrelevant offers are adding to the noise.
Luckily, you can easily fix this problem. How? By using technology. Most marketers are already using technology to collect relevant data about their customers. But there are very few who are using tech to analyze and put this data to use.
Don’t just use technology to collect data – use it to turn the data into insights that can help you in guiding and personalizing your marketing messages. Now you know why email marketing is not generating the kind of ROI you are expecting from it. When you stop making these email marketing mistakes, no one can stop your marketing emails from converting.
Now, go create awesome emails!