In this blog post, Laura Johnson, a friend of the Founder Institute network, talks about the frequent mistakes that many founders make when carring out an email marketing campaign.
When done right, email marketing can improve any type of business. It can improve a brick-and-mortar business, like a restaurant that sends its subscribers menus and coupons, and it can improve an e-commerce business that sells a product or offers a virtual service.
While many entrepreneurs have heard about the benefits of email marketing—increased sales, building a relationship with an audience over time, and effortless branding—not all email marketing campaigns are successful.
Sometimes, the problem is a simple one: not enough traffic. Fortunately, lead generation to a landing page is not as difficult as you might imagine. There are many third-party services that do all the heavy-lifting for you so you can focus on improving conversions when people do show up on your landing page. Horizon advertising and email lists demonstrate the kind of service that helps entrepreneurs generate leads for their business.
If email marketing is a proven way to build a business, why do only a few people who strive to build a home based business have success with it? And it’s not just the solopreneur who struggles with email marketing, so do businesses of all types and sizes. Does this suggest that the email marketing model is broken?
Is the Email Marketing Model Broken?
If the model were broken then nobody would be successful with it. Moreover, those who have found success with it acquire such astonishing success that they boldly claim that “the money is in the list.”
Here’s the thing: the problem is not in the model itself, but in the business owner‘s application of it
The Email Marketing Model: Statistically, 44% of email recipients make at least one purchase every year from a promotional email.
Marketer’s Results: 40% of marketers say that they don’t get a positive return on the time and money they invest in their email marketing campaigns.
The problem is not the model, but the errors people make when applying the model.
5 Common Email Marketing Mistakes
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the errors marketers make and how to fix them.
Problem #1: Beginner’s Mistakes
Beginners make many mistakes that would shock a seasoned marketer.
1. They send their marketing emails from their personal email account. Sending promotional emails from your Gmail, Yahoo, or Bing account is probably the biggest mistake you can make. This only works for one-on-one communications, but it does not work for mass communications. Most of your messages will be flagged as spam and you will be seen as a rank amateur by your recipients.
2. They send marketing emails without asking for permission. Recipients are guarded about their inbox and when they see an email from an unknown marketer, it is immediately marked as spam.
Use a professional email provider service that can deliver emails to tens of thousands of people without any problems. Your emails will get delivered and they will get read.
Problem #2: Sending email to a bad address.
While a professional email provider service will take care of the delivery for you, it’s up to you to keep your list clean. Over time, you will develop a list of bad addresses. People either gave you a bad email in the first place or they have since abandoned their email account.
There are two reasons why this is bad for your business:
1. You are paying for the number of people on your list. So you’re paying more for having an inflated list with bad addresses.
2. Your sender’s email will eventually be blacklisted by the major personal email providers like Google and Yahoo.
You can clean up your list by using a tool like LeadSpend who offer a comprehensive solution to identify the validity of an email address. You’ll not only improve your sender reputation, but you will improve your chances of running a profitable campaign.
Mistake #3: Bad messaging
A long, rambling email is usually deleted within seconds. If you want to get people to read your entire email and to click on a link, you must use copywriting techniques. You can either learn how to be a good copywriter or hire someone to write your emails for you. It will make a huge difference in your open, click-through, and response rates. When it comes to poor messaging the biggest mistakes are hyped up promises in the subject lines, heavy-handed sales promotions in the body, and rambling content pieces that offer little to no value. Poor messaging is a sure way to motivate people to unsubscribe from your list.
Mistake #4: Poor formatting
You should use the right formatting for your emails. This means paying attention to the width of your emails, which should be a 600px maximum width. You also want to use plenty of paragraphing. If you send an email that is a solid body of text, it will get deleted fast even if you have written a brilliant email.
Mistake #5: Not building a relationship with subscribers
A common mistake is constantly pitching subscribers in every email. You have to work out a ratio between content emails and promotional emails. By constantly pitching your list, you will quickly burn it out.
Email Marketing Works When Done Right
The only way to get good at launching email marketing campaigns is to constantly test and tweak your messages. Financially, every dollar you spend earns you about $44.25.
Laura Johnson is a part time blogger and full time adventurer. She enjoys writing about anything that sparks her interest. This especially includes her passion for business and branding!
(Concept of sending e-mails from your computer image by Shutterstock)
