Email Marketing: 10 Reasons why you're getting it wrong

Are you currently sending unsolicited emails as a promotional vehicle for your business?

As a digital marketer, I believe that you are wasting your time and money on sending unsolicited bulk emails to people. So in the interest of helping you succeed and getting your email marketing right, I will show you why you are getting it wrong.

A friend of mine once used to offer bulk email services and he was regularly been called up by clients requesting his service. He had a price list for ranges of 10,000-20,000 up to 1, 000,000 and above emails.

Clients would call him up and choose the volume of emails they wanted to be sent, provide him with their promotion and we would just send the emails using one of them bulk email software’s that he had.

So which mailing list or newsletter subscriber list was he sending the bulk emails too? And how did he get it?

He built for himself an email database from soliciting email addresses from friends, contacts and in his words ‘Harvesting emails from search engines’.

Little wonder clients dried up and he had to stop offering that service.

After reading Neil Patel’s A Beginner’s Guide to Successful Email Marketing at the start of my journey to becoming a digital marketer, I called my old friend ‘the bulk email sender’ and I said hey, you shouldn’t have offered that service because you were sending unsolicited emails to people which can be regarded as spam.

Yes! I agree with you, he was spamming as a service.

I hope that after you have read this article, you will discard sending bulk unsolicited emails and adopt best practice to the benefit of your growth. Here are the reasons why you are getting your email marketing wrong.

#Reason 1: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

Sending unsolicited emails

In recent years, everyone with an email address gets to receive quite a lot of emails every day and most of them unsolicited mails. ‘Bulk email marketers’ just keep sending you promotional emails of one product or service.

To say that we have gotten tired of receiving these emails would be an understatement.

The open rate of most emails that are unsolicited is low because they are filtered from entering inbox and go into junk mails.

Most people never bother to check their junk emails other than to empty it.? So if you are sending unsolicited bulk emails as a promotional vehicle, your emails may just end up been emptied in the junk email folder and may never get read.

Complete waste of time isn’t it?

So if you have thought of using bulk mailers to send promotional emails or you are already doing it. Shelve the idea.

You may have ignorantly broken a law and may not be aware of the consequences. It is unfortunate that my country Nigeria is yet to enact anti-SPAM laws but most western countries have such laws.

But not having the law enacted in your resident country does not mean that it is right to send unsolicited emails to people. First of all it is unethical.

#Reason 2: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

Not having email sign ups

If you have ignored having an email signup form on your website then you probably have lost one of the key channels to build for yourself a loyal community of followers and readers.

Email signup forms come handy when you’re looking at building your mailing list. When visitors opt to give you their emails, they consent to receiving emails from you. But in actual growth sense their telling you that they believe in your brand.

Subscribers to your email updates are the people who will actually get to read and share your content.

At Nativedge, we use HelloBar and we’ve had a wonderful experience thus far. It’s very easy to install, all you have to do is copy the code snippet and paste in the header of you HTML file and there is a plugin for word press websites that is easy to install as well.

If you are thinking of overheads, Hellobar is free and I recommend that you try it out if you don’t have a signup page. You may want to explore the features of HelloBar to see the actionable ways to collect emails.

Neil Patel and Co did an excellent job there, they made features to enable drive traffic to your website, collect emails and engage visitors.

#Reason 3: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

Not sending a welcome email

If you have an email signup form on your website and blog and you don??t send a welcome email to you subscribers when they opt to receive your emails updates you may have just lost an opportunity to start engaging the subscriber from the beginning.

Image courtesy of jesadaphorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Welcoming and thanking you new subscribers tells them that you care that they bothered to register and you are acknowledging them.

An automated email from your mail service provider helps you to engage your first time subscribers from the beginning. So if you haven’t setup a welcome email and you are losing engagement opportunity.

Image courtesy of jesadaphorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Follow the easy automation setup offered by your mail provider and you are good to go. But if you were using one of those ‘Bulk Mail Sending Apps’ you will want to change to change to one of the reputable providers below:

MailChimp

Campaign Monitor

AWeber

Constant Contact

I also recommend that you read 10 examples of highly effective welcome emails.

#Reason 4: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

Not personalizing your emails

People are more receptive of emails one it is personalized. When you receive an email addressed to you, you get the impression that email was target for you and they sender cares enough to address a mail to you and not just send random emails.

Personalized emails can make people in your email list more receptive to reading and engaging your content.

A survey carried out in December 2013 on US online shoppers by Harris Interactive found that most recipients of personalized emails drawn from previous shopping habits and preferences would be more likely to increase their purchases.

81% of the shoppers said that they were somewhat likely to make additional purchase either online or off-line.

You may want to explore personalization options with your email provider. You can add a name field in your email signup form to collect the names of your subscribers along with their emails.

#Reason 4: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

Pitching too often

Imagine receiving regular emails from a firm asking you to purchase a product or service. Even if you opted for their email updates, the first couple of emails may be ok.

If you keep sending out emails with too many pitches, you will most likely see people on your mail list unsubscribing from your updates. Digital marketing legend Neil Patel once said ‘Successful marketers sell the experience of their products and services and not just the features’.

Image courtesy of jesadaphorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So if you would like to keep your reader’s engagement are committed to receiving your email updates, focus less on pitching them to buy your product and tell them more about the experience that comes with the product.

You should always use your email updates to enhance your relationship your readers or customers rather than buzzing their inbox with pitches.

#Reason 5: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

Unresponsive email template

More and more people now use their phones and tablets to read emails so if your email templates are not responsive; you definitely are going to have a steep increase in your bounce rates.

You sure don’t want your email to look clumsy when viewed from a mobile device. So make sure that your email templates are responsive.

#Reason 6: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

Overusing images

A lot of email subscribers have images disabled from the email settings, and a good number of them will be viewing your email updates from mobile devices. so you don’t want to over use images in email updates to avoid your email looking like this:

If your email is viewed by a subscriber and he sees a mail similar to the image above, of course he will close it because it is not legible.

To reduce your bounce rate, you should avoid over using images and makes sure that the ones you use are compressed for the web to avoid slowing down the load time.

#Reason 7: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

No Call to action or you provide to many choices

What are your objectives for the mails that you send?

What do you want your subscribers or customers to do when they read your email?

If you don’t add call to actions in your email updates then you are not positioned for conversion in the first place.

As expected you readers will do nothing after reading your email, simply because you didn’t provide them with any option to do something.

Also, if you have too many calls to actions in your emails telling readers to do different things, like asking them to click multiple links or buttons, you may end up getting your readers confused about what to do.

Image courtesy of jesadaphorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As a rule of the thumb, a single call to action is the most powerful to optimize you conversion.

Think about it, if you have a need and you are presented by only a single choice to solve your need, wouldn’t you go with the choice without hesitating? Most people will and I know I would.

So you see the power of a single call to action right. It’s even more powerful when you repeat the same call to action in the email.

#Reason 8: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

Not using measurable data

Without measurable data you cannot tell how your email campaigns are going. You can’t tell what you are doing wrong or what you need to improve on or even if you are establishing relationships in the first place.

Let me bring up my old friend again, the ‘bulk email sender’ the one I spoke about earlier. One of the reasons that he was making money by sending unsolicited email

campaigns for customers was because emails campaigns then was new in Nigeria as people got more aware the patronage stopped.

But I also noticed a trend then with his bulk email service, his churn rate was high. He didn’t have many repeat customers. After a couple of campaigns without measurable data for impact assessment the clients termed his service as a ‘Nice to have’ but not necessarily a business tool.

Unfortunately he was doing everything wrong about email marketing. If he had access to measurable data, it would have made some difference.

The importance of analytics in email marketing cannot be over emphasised. All the email providers I mentioned initially give complementary analytics services.

In email marketing, it is important that you are constantly aware of open rates, clicks through rates and unsubscribes.

I recommend that you read segmentation and Analysis in Neil Patel’s A Beginner’s Guide to Successful Email Marketing to have a deep view of how analytics works in email marketing.

#Reason 9: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

Segmentation to target people

For over four months Tolet (an online real estate venture in Nigeria) kept bombarding my inbox with unsolicited emails pitching numerous property listings to me. It didn’t stop there, the properties they were pitching to me where in Lagos, Nigeria.

At this point, I said hold a bit Tolet but I don’t even live in Lagos, I live in Abuja which is 747KM from Lagos and it’s a 9 hour drive. Why are you pitching properties in Lagos to me and not properties in Abuja?

I understood that I was not the target. Tolet meant to send their promotions to people in Lagos not people in Abuja. They didn’t use segmentation in their email management tool to target people by geographic location.

If you are currently running an email promotion and geographic location is key but yet you are not utilizing segmentation, then you may just be sending your emails to the wrong audience.

#Reason 10: Why you are getting your Email Marketing Wrong

Not A/B testing your subject Line

If you just type in a subject line to your emails, click on email send and that’s it, you may be getting your email marketing wrong and converting less readers.

An email’s subject line is the most important aspect of an email and may be the only thing that will make a subscriber to open your email. We all receive lots of emails a day and what makes an email stand out is the subject line.

Getting the right subject line is paramount. And the best way to get a subject line that will drive engagement and possible conversion is to A/B test. You will need to compare different subject lines to see which one drives more engagement.

From the A/B testing for subject line for two variations as show above, you can see that variation A is what the marketing should go with as it led to more conversions.

Most reputable email service providers have options for A/B testing for emails, explore it.

Conclusion

My objective of writing this article is to dissuade you from sending unsolicited emails but rather imbibe best practice and build a loyal list of subscribers that will constantly engage your emails because the consented to and the fact that your email is of quality.

So what do you think? What email marketing mistakes do you know of that I didn’t mention here? I would like to know.

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