Many businesses assume that email marketing is an old-fashioned, out-of-date practice that really isn’t worth bothering with. But with the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets in recent years, emails are more accessible and more valuable than ever.
Have you tried email marketing? Most businesses make common mistakes that could be having a negative impact on their efforts. Make sure you don’t fall foul of these and give email marketing another try…
Permission
Do you have permission to email everyone on your database? If not then you could be doing more harm than good.
If the recipient does not recognise where the email is coming from, it is highly unlikely that they will read the email. You’re also at higher risk of being marked as ‘spam’ and it could be against UK data protection laws.
This means that purchasing data to email is a big NO. These people don’t know who you are, haven’t requested to receive your emails and are probably going to instantly unsubscribe.
There’s plenty of other ways to naturally build a database, it may take longer than bulk-buying information, but the end results will be much more valuable.
Design
When was your email template designed? Does it look ok on mobile devices? With up to 60% of emails now being read on a mobile device and four-fifths of people deleting messages if they have to zoom in to read them, it is essential that your email looks good across all devices. Make sure your template isn’t overly complicated or too wide – the recommended maximum width is 600px.
Personalisation
Research has shown that using personalisation in an email can increase email marketing revenue by up to 500%. There really isn’t a reason not to use personalisation, it’s a standard tool of email marketing systems now. If you don’t have first names available in order to fulfil this – then you really need to re-evaluate where your data is coming from.
Timekeeping
Get into a routine for sending out your email campaigns, decide an achieveable goal and make sure you stick to it. Whether you are sending out emails once a week, once a month or quarterly, if you stick to a similar time/ day, recipients will know when to expect your emails.
It’s always been said that the middle of the week is the best time to send a marketing email, the post-weekend emails have been cleared and everyone is still in work-mode before Friday comes around. That doesn’t necessarily mean it works for all businesses and industries, so test out different times to see which is most successful for you.
Keeping track
You’ve done the hard part and got your email campaign sent out, but that doesn’t mean you should forget about it. How many people opened it? What links were clicked? Make the most of analytics software available, this will help you to make decisions about what you should include in your next campaign.
Track any click-throughs using your Google Analytics and see if any of these turned into sales or enquiries. If you’re getting little or no results, then you need to take a step back and look at your email marketing; what could be improved?