5 EMAIL MARKETING BLUNDERS YOU SHOULD AVOID AS A BUSINESS OWNER

As a small or medium scale business owner, you can never underestimate the importance of including email marketing in your marketing strategies. Not just incorporating email marketing but executing it in the most appropriate result centric way. On average, every $1 you invest in email marketing yields you approximately $44 in return. With this nature of Return on Investment (ROI), it’s hard not to recognize the necessity of adopting email marketing as a valuable marketing asset.

Why Email Marketing?

Email Marketing can be used to;

• Contact customers
• Distribute relevant contents
• Delver company news and updates
• Introduce new products and services to existing customers
• Promote a discount on a product or service
• Amongst many others.

Though these benefits of email marketing are juicy advantages you want to get, marketers don’t reap the full benefits because of some embarrassing email marketing blunders they make. Even with powerful email marketing platforms and tools, you can still make these mistakes.

For the sake of your brand, we put this piece together to help you avoid these top mistakes every other business owner make.

Using Generic Company Email Accounts

Before you start an email campaign, ask yourself the primary goal you wish to achieve; probably, interaction with your customers. With this goal in mind, you wouldn’t want to use email addresses such as info@comapny.com or noreply@company.com. These forms of addresses may be suitable for organizational purposes, but they send a cold message to your readers that you don’t care about them. Surely, your goal is to get your readers’ attention not to organize your email; though it’s essential.

Instead, use personalized addresses which shows some empathy and passages a message that you care about your consumers and want to hear from them. This will help you develop a lasting relationship with your audience.

Only Sending Discounts, promotional and Sales Emails

It’s understandable that you want to tell your audience about your products and what they stand to gain. However, do you care about how they live, how they celebrate and how they feel about your brand? It all comes down to the issue of caring about your customers, being empathetic.

If you’re sending your audience emails on discounts only, you may be annoying your brand out of their minds. While promotional emails play their part in promoting your business, tune down on it. A more significant percentage of your content should be informative, entertaining and valuable while a lesser percentage should be the sales emails. This is the 80/20 rule. Instead of bombarding your customers with promotions, give them contents that’ll add value to their lives. You’ll be happy you did.

Broken Email Designs

Never use broken email designs. These are email newsletters that do not appear or function correctly across all platforms. Your emails need to look presentable and function properly across all email clients from Yahoo to Gmail, outlook, etc. Without a well-formatted design, subscribers can mark your emails as spam, thereby killing your brand reputation and undermining your marketing efforts.

Not Segmenting your subscriber lists

Surely, all your subscribers have different purposes for subscribing to your emails. These subscribers expect to receive emails related to what they subscribed for and not have their email box packed with messages irrelevant to them.

Segmenting your entire email list of subscribers into smaller, categorized lists according to what they subscribed for helps you target the right audience with their relevant information. Email marketing automation software can help you carry out this task effectively. Take your time to determine how your lists should be categorized and go for the software that suits you most.

Failing to include a Call to Action

A Call to Action (CTA) is a command, request, push, etc. which urges a reader to take a step, carry out an action based on the contents of the material read. A Call to Action tells a reader exactly what to do.

Failing to include these in your marketing email is another mistake email marketers make. When creating an email marketing campaign, make a little time and strategize on the most suitable call to action to use. The CTA to be used should be determined by the action you want them to take including learn about a product, read your latest post, reply for more information, etc.

Whatever the reason for the email is, give your readers something to take a step with or your email marketing efforts will be in vain.

Conclusively, do well to determine the best frequency and timing for your emails. Sending too many emails annoys your subscribers and sending too few emails leads to lack of brand recognition from your readers. Determine the right frequency for you and go for it. Also consider the timing, tone, and persona of your audience while composing and sending out emails.

Furthermore, take analytics on every email campaign you carry out. This will help you know your strong points and your weak points and know how to channel in your energy and strategy in subsequent campaigns.

We wish you luck!