No one expects to hear that e-mail is dead. In many ways, e-mail is dead for a lot of small reasons that people might not consider in start but those mistakes leave a long lasting effect. If your e-mail list is not growing, your unsubscribe rates are more than your open rates, you may want to rethink how to use e-mail more effectively to reach your target audience.
There are different approaches on how to best use e-mail to reach customers and prospects. But before considering those, you need to eliminate the mistakes that are creating issues in the email marketing campaign. So before you dump e-mail marketing altogether, consider if you’re guilty of any of the following behaviors
SENDING OUT EMAILS WITHOUT PERMISSION
No one likes to have unnecessary emails landing in their inboxes. Sending out emails without permission is an absolute ‘no-no.’ emails stay effective as long as they are permission based. An email marketing list should contain the addresses of only those who have subscribed for the emails. Sending email to random people increases the chance of high bounce rate and a lot of spam complaints.
NO SEGMENTATION
Success of an email marketing campaign depends highly on the relevance of its content to the audience. Without a proper audience segmentation, you cannot maintain the relevancy. If you do an email blast on the complete mailing list, it will hardly give you the desired results. Not only that, it may have negative effects too. The segmentation can be done on the basis of location, demographic attributes or on the basis of content preferences.
NO ‘UNSUBSCRIBE’ OPTION
Once someone subscribes with you that doesn’t mean he would like to continue receiving emails from you forever. Always make sure you have a clear unsubscribe option in your mail. If you don’t give an ‘Unsubscribe’ option in your email, your subscribers might mark your mail as ‘Spam’ to stop getting mails from you. You are also risking to get listed in their “Blocked Email Senders” list. And, if a good number of recipients do this, it will harm your email deliverability.
OVER TARGETING
It’s necessary for the marketers to know that over targeting is also harmful for their email marketing campaign. As you already have segmented your targeted audience, so if you try to filter them again, there’s a very high chance that you remove people who would be important for you to achieve a higher conversion.
PREFERRING YOUR OWN BUSINESS INTEREST ON THE CHOICE YOUR AUDIENCE
Marketers often make a very common mistake of keep talking about their services and forget that the audience is least bothered about them and their business. All they care about is, what is in it for them.
MISLEADING CLAIMS
OVERLOOKING TIMING
Timing is very important factors for achieving high open rates. The whole effort of creating the good content, targeting the right type people, goes in vain if the timing is wrong. The marketers often forget to consider timing as a critical factor, because of that they suffer.
RESPONSIVENESS
The Amount of people, who check their emails on phones and tablets, have increased manifolds. Almost half of the emails are opened on mobile devices. The reason behind this huge popularity is the ease of access. So if your email designs are not responsive enough to fit any screen, your customers are much likely to leave it unattended. So, keep your emails responsive & compatible with mobile devices.
GEOGRAPHICALLY DISPERSED AUDIENCE
In any online business, it’s obvious that its customers are spread across different time zones. If you have one standard time for all of your audience, you might lose your potential customer.
These are some of the mistakes that you might be doing frequently without even considering it even the slightest. So next time, before you send your emails, take a look at this list. You will definitely get better results if you go with these points.