Email marketing is still incredibly important for businesses. According to statistics, 95% of online consumers have an email address. This means that email marketing can be a cheap and effective effective method for reaching a large percentage of our consumers. It’s not just the wide reach of email marketing that makes it a worthwhile marketing method, but it’s also the potential return that it offers.
The conversion rates for email marketing are three times higher than they are for social media marketing. Statistics also show that for every $1 that a business spends on an email campaign, they get an average return of $44.25. In order to nurture leads, build your brand and increase your conversion rates, you need to be implementing an email marketing campaign. To make your email marketing campaign successful, avoid these ten email marketing fails.
Avoiding Responsiveness Optimisation
With emails being viewed from multiple devices, responsiveness optimisation is essential. Statistics show that 48% of emails are opened on a mobile device. If your consumers view an email from your company on their smartphone, and they have to scroll across the page, or scale the page to be able to read it, they are likely to just skip over it. The example below shows a lack of responsiveness optimisation by the sender.
The Email Address makes your Emails Look Like Spam
If your email address looks unprofessional, then your emails will probably be marked as spam. If you take your business seriously, get a professional sounding email address and ensure that the recipients stand the best chance of recognising your brand.
There’s No Clear Call to Action
Your emails talk about your products or services and maybe all of the generous promotional offers your site is offering. What’s missing is a clear call to action. A CTA is important. It tells your reader what you want them to do. Without it you will get minimal return on your investment, and you definitely won’t increase your conversion rate.
This email from The Whisky Exchange looks highly professional, but it includes no call to action. If there’s no call to action, the company’s customers won’t know what action to take next, and their email was essentially a waste of time.
Too Many CTAs
On the opposite end of the spectrum, many emails use too many CTAs. Putting a “shop now” link several times throughout your email is a bad idea. You don’t want your emails to be too cluttered or too unfocused. Emails containing dozens of CTAs end up looking like junk mail too. If the reader is presented with too many links, they will likely skip over the email. For example, this Macy’s email, which advertises the store’s Super Saturday promotion, contains far too many links. There’s the $10 off deal the 20% of deal and literally a dozen links to the store’s products. This simply leaves the reader confused and wondering where to click.
Too Many Graphics
A busy looking email that’s full of images, banners and flashing graphics is very distracting. These graphics will take away from the copy and the call to action, and you won’t get your customers to take the action you desire. Don’t use too many images, and make sure the ones that you do use don’t take away from what your email is trying to achieve.
No Valuable Content
If you keep sending out emails that simply promote your products, services or offers and deals that your site is currently running, then people will simply stop reading your emails, or they will unsubscribe. Your emails need to offer value to customers. So if you sell fitness supplements for example, don’t just promote your products. Instead, send out how-to fitness emails. Creating email content that is valuable, informative, and solves an issue or meets a need for your customers is essential. Good content also give you more opportunity to use a clickbait subject line.
Ineffective Copy
Good copy engages and connects with your customers on a personal level. It looks professional and it’s written in a way that prompts the customers to take action. There are 247 billion emails sent per day, much of which is spam. If you want your customers to take your emails seriously, then you need to take the time to make your copy effective. Copy that’s poorly written or littered with spelling errors looks highly unprofessional, and simply screams spam.
This copy from Facebook is ineffective for a number of reasons. It’s not compelling, engaging or particularly interesting either. Also, the first line is missing a question mark.
No Personalisation
The biggest email marketing fail is not personalising your emails. Starting your email with “Hi”, “Dear Subscriber”, or the dreaded “Dear Sir/Madam” is sure fire way to get your emails marked as junk. Your copy must use the terms “you”, “me” and “us” when addressing the customer too. This email from Polldaddy is a personalisation fail. It doesn’t even use the usual “Dear Sir/Madam”. Instead it begins with “Hi Unknown”. When the reader sees that, they will immediately cross of the email, and mark future correspondence as spam.
Poor Subject Line
Email marketing campaigns often use truly abysmal subject lines. 69% of people report an email as spam as a result of the subject line. Subject lines that are overly sales-orientated or impersonal are usually marked as spam. Dull subject lines that don’t entice the customer or even intrigue the customer will also cause your emails to be ignored.
This email boasts the subject line “Marketing List”, which is a truly a marketing fail.
Poor Layout
Misaligned text and poorly placed graphics can make a well-written email look very unprofessional. An email with a poor layout will reflect badly on your business. If your call to action gets lost between poorly aligned text and images, your emails definitely won’t increase your conversion rates.
Overall, email marketing can be a highly profitable marketing method. In fact, statistics show that customers who receive marketing offers via email spend 138% more than consumers who don’t. They are also the most effective way to increase repeat purchases and to develop brand loyalty. So when you create your email marketing campaign, make sure you avoid these marketing fails.
Jan At the beginning of the June, our email marketing platform went through some enhancements in features and functionality, including mobile/SMS features (available July, 2011), Facebook and Twitter integrations, and the new workflow automation canvas.
What’s new:
Send Time Optimisation
For each contact, send time optimisation automatically schedules email messages to send at the time of day, and optionally the day of the week, the contact is most likely to open emails from you. You should avoid using send time optimization for time sensitive deliveries where you want control over when the email is sent. If a contact is new or we don’t have sufficient open time data for a contact, the delivery will be made using the time you choose using the Send message now or Send at this time radio buttons.
NOTE: send time optimisation option is only enabled in advanced options when sending your email campaign.
Workflows (available end of June, 2011)
With workflows you can specify combinations of triggers, filters, and actions that determine how to handle contact data, and what marketing communications to send them.
Facebook Integration
By integrating your email account with a Facebook account you’ll be able to add a Like button to email messages and webforms, schedule & post Facebook messages, let contacts sign-up using their Facebook information, and map Facebook data to contact fields. You can also trigger workflows based on if someone liked a status, liked a page, commented on a status, or posted to a page.
Twitter Integration
As with Facebook integration, integrating your account with your Twitter account allows you to post to Twitter and track the posts made via the application. You can also trigger workflows based on whether a contact mentions or retweets a Twitter username you have setup in your account.
Support For QR Codes
QR codes allow you to encode a URL into an image that you can add to email messages. If a contact prints out the email, they can take a picture of the QR code with their smart phone and they will be redirected to the URL you specified for the QR code. Read more about What’s a QR code.
Redesigned Message Overview Page
Redesigned message overview page now includes more information about metrics associated with email messages, as well as the delivery groups which an email message has been added to.
Auto-Saving of Messages
This new feature will auto-save your messages automatically to the Drafts folder every minute. That way, if you forget to save a message or your computer crashes, you will still be able to access the version of the message you were working on. The Drafts folder is automatically created for you when this feature is enabled.
Message Approval Prior to Sending
When enabled, all newly created messages will require approval before they can be send. To enable go to: Home > Settings > General >
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Recently I seem to be coming across a lot of popular misconceptions being churned out, both by business owners who have unfortunately been told or have read incorrect information, or even, and more worryingly; people who write about digital marketing or SEO in the mainstream or industry press. Below is a collection of my favourite online marketing myths, feel free to add your own in the comments.
Content is king
Yes, it is correct that all websites need good content, and ideally need good content being added on a regular basis. However the “content is king” mantra seems to have misled people into thinking that ALL you need to do for your marketing effort is to add what you consider to be good content. Content needs to be optimised, content needs to be linkable, content needs to be publicised, content needs to be linked to. Lots of great content remains ignored and unranked as it is passed over for more mediocre but better publicised and linked-to alternatives.
Build Multiple Sites
You have one website that’s doing very well, if you add another you’ll double that success. Add 10 new sites and you’ll be retiring in the next 12 months right? Wrong. Ten more sites will mean 10 times the marketing effort and budget, and ten times the cost. Having one site with 1000 pages of content on it with 1000 links will perform far better than the same content and links divided between two sites.
By consolidating content and links onto one domain you will increase that domains trust and authority, which will mean it’ll rank far higher than it would if the resources were split across two properties.
The only time I would advocate building more than one site is for strategic business reasons such as a planned sell-off. If you are running several sites for no particular reason, other than it seemed like a good idea I would certainly look at consolodating them.
E-Mail Marketing Is Spam
Spam is bad mmmkay? Don’t do it. EMail Marketing to an opt-in list that you have built as part of your brand will deliver a massive return on investment. Every company should be building, collating, segmenting and marketing to your customer data, it is a tremendously valuable resource. Avoid emailing people too often, and for heavens sake keep it interesting, useful and punchy.
All Sites Are Equal
Certainly in an SEO sense this isn’t the case. You’ll find that bigger brands can get away with a lot more than tiny start-ups. Older, more trusted domains with a higher authority can get away with using far more spammy tactics that would get smaller sites penalised. Google hasn’t exactly levelled the playing field with the Google brand update, which is rumoured to give big brands a rankings boost for certain commercial keywords.
Social Media Is A Fad
The rocket-like growth of social media sites has taken many people by surprise, online marketers, brands and PR agencies included. People react to change in different ways, some labelling the growth as a fad, something to be ignored. Others learn and adapt and have made millions in the process.
Social media is a fundamental shift in the way people communicate, used correctly it is a cost effective way of reaching brand advocates, consumers and influencers. Just because you haven’t worked out the best way of using, tracking, measuring and monetising social media for your brand doesn’t mean it’s not worth the time.
Rankings And Traffic Are Your Most Important Metrics
Checking your sites rankings is fine, and it’s a good idea to keep a close eye on your traffic numbers, but are these your most important metrics? Probably not. SEOs and online marketers in my opinion spend far too long obsessing over rankings and traffic numbers, and less time learning about conversion rates, segmenting visitor sources, looking at link acquisition rates, keyword £ values and ultimately sales volumes. Not many clients will tell you they value visitor numbers over money in their pocket.
Search Engine Submission
No, just no. If anyone tells you that you need to submit your site to a search engine give them a sharp poke in the eye. Search engines have gone far beyond having to be told where sites are located and are quite capable of finding them themselves through links. It’s been this way since the 1990’s but the myth just won’t go away.
Magic Page Keyword Density
I keep hearing the same question asked time and time again about what the optimum page keyword density is. There certainly isn’t a magic mathematical formula for keyword % that will give you any kind of boost over your competitors.
It’s far more important to write for your visitors and intelligently use your keywords in certain places on the page – sure it’s logical that they should be present in the body text, but search engines will attribute a far higher weight to words mentioned in places like the page titles, image alt tags, headings, bold and italic text etc.
Flash Sites
There are a huge number of misconceptions about flash websites. Can search engines read them or not? On the whole, now yes they can, text and links can be read, with the exception of some JavaScript links. Until 2008 this wasn’t always the case, with most flash sites being all but invisible to search engines.
So is now the time to rush-off and convert your site to flash because it looks so lovely? Probably not. There are still many fundamental reasons why flash sites don’t perform as well in search engines as their HTML cousins. Problems with page mark-up, content not being on unique URLs, and doubts over crawlability all don’t lend flash sites to ranking well in search engines.