The world of Email Marketing has been evolving so very rapidly that it becomes mandatory for every business, big or small, to stay updated with the current trends and know the factors that make or break an email marketing campaign. Customer engagement and acquisition through email marketing has quadrupled in past few years, which testifies the effectives and evolution of email marketing for businesses worldwide. Below are the email marketing mistakes that one must avoid to boost campaign performance, ROI and customer engagement in 2015 to create a highly successful email marketing campaign.
POOR SUBJECT LINE
Email subject lines should be enticing enough to not give away the anticipated content of the email. They need to be short, fit the screen of various devices (mobile device responsive) and should be clear enough that the people know why you’re sending the email.
Additionally, bad selection of certain words and phrases can mark you as SPAM or may even get you into some trouble.
The only issue with creating creative subject lines is that you get very less space to impress your audience.
• Make sure the subject lines are short and sweet and within 30 characters
• Make sure your subject line and preheader work together for your brand
• Browse through subject line’s of your competitor’s in your industry and see what makes them stand out. Similarly, you can compile a list of keywords that have helped you boost your open rate in previous campaigns.
• A proper subject line can make or break your campaign.
POOR FREQUENCY
Most common mistake you can make is to send the initial campaigns with lot of research and testing and then stop sending any more email campaigns after the first couple if there is a lack of good response. To avoid this, here’s what you can do:
i.) create a stock of weekly, monthly newsletters, and
ii.) use an email automation tools to schedule those emails.
Consistency will be maintained and the audience wouldn’t be surprised seeing an email from you.
It should also be noted that a flood of emails isn’t going to attract your audience. Your email campaign’s optimal frequency is based on your target audience as well as their expectations from you. Find a middle ground between campaign engagement and periodic engagement and work towards improving it.
ZERO TESTING
After all the hard work in designing the content and the creative, it doesn’t matter how impressive an email campaign looks to you, not all the recipients are going to agree on that. Test those emails on Outlook, free platforms such a Gmail, Hotmail, etc. as well as check if the email layout is responsive to all kinds of devices.
Here’s what you can test:
• From Name
• Subject Line
• Day of the week that brings out optimum results
• Time of the day that brings out optimum results
• Frequency
• Font styles and colors
• Gifs vs Images
• Length of the email
• Landing Page
• CTA – phone number and link
NO CTA
Who is at a loss here? After creating an amazing email campaign but forgetting to include a link through which readers can connect to the business.
Calls-to-action can prompt recipients to ask more questions about a certain product or marketing offers. It’s a beautiful way of creating a path of healthy customer engagement. A simple clickable link can lead readers to the business website or the social media pages and create a path of healthy customer engagement.
Here’s one quick and easy tip: Use bright and bold colors for button images that will be used for CTAs.
IRRELEVANT CONTENT
Recipients are going to chose precise and informative content over long, boring and irrelevant emails. That’s going to be a big trouble in today’s world where marketers are used to selling an item to 1000 customers in 140 characters in a matter of minutes.
Business owners need to create interesting content such that recipients look forward to reading those emails and definitely not to shoving down the trash purposes.
Knowing what your customers want can help you create compelling content. Clickthrough rates from previous email campaigns can help you track the success of contents that attracted high rates. You can also create an editorial calendar. Maintain the frequency of your emails and keep producing content that your audience is interested in.
Learn how FrescoData’s Email Marketing List can be used for your marketing campaigns.
