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Are you reaping the goldmine sitting in your contact list?
If you’re reading this, you know that there is good business waiting in that list. Done right, you can make money off of every email you send. The Direct Marketing Association found that email marketing has a return-on-investment of 4300%1. 4300%! It’s considerably more effective than social media marketing, though that has its place as well.
However, a single “bad” email marketing message can permanently burn bridges with customers. It can get you on the “unsubscribe” list, or worse, marked as a spammer.
Here are a few mistakes to watch out for:
1. Not obtaining proper permission from your contact list
This almost goes without saying, but failing to do this can result in unsubscribes or being flagged for spam. It can even land you in trouble with the law. The Commonwealth Spam Act of 2003 regulates commercial messages, and enacts civil penalties for violations.
2. Focusing on your business’ features, rather than your customers’ needs.
Customers aren’t reading to learn about the features or specifics of what you do. What pique their interest are the benefits your service provides to them. If you’re selling cars, they’re not interested in the features, such as how many cylinders it has or the gas mileage – they want to hear about the benefits they can get, such as how fast it accelerates or how much they will save on petrol.
One way to explain the benefits your business provides is through storytelling. Tell the story of clients you helped or of specific pain points you solved. If you can build emotions into your content, all the better.
Make sure to provide free, quality, actionable content in every email as well. This will show them your expertise and get them to remember you when they need to hire someone who knows what they’re doing. Check out our post on creating buyer personas for more tips on how to match your content to your ideal clients.
3. Ineffective subject lines.
The subject line is the gateway to your email. Does it make your email stand out amongst the pile of emails in your contact’s inbox?
A good subject line should intrigue the potential reader and make it easier to open the email than to delete it. It should signal that there is valuable information waiting inside the email, giving your subscriber the compulsion to open it than delete it.
That’s the defining feature of quality content, whether in the subject line or inside the message: it is easier for the contact to read it, than to delete it.
Aim at a subject line between 5 and 10 words – this is long enough to describe the content of the message, but still short enough to be read in a glance.
4. Failing to engage your list often enough.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the more emails you send to a list, the more sales there will be. This is true up to a point, but sending emails too often can get them deleted or get the dreaded “unsubscribe”. On the flip side, sending emails too infrequently means you’re missing out on business and killing the connection with your client.
Email marketing tools such as Infusionsoft include automatic frequency analysis features. These can help you determine the frequency that maximises the click-through and sales rates for your email marketing campaign.
5. Sending at the wrong time.
Mailchimp conducted an analysis of billions of email addresses in the Email Genome Project and found that emails sent on weekdays, around 10 AM, have the highest open rate. The open rate for business-related emails sent during weekday evenings or on the weekends drops significantly.
6. No clear call-to-action
From your business’ point-of-view, what is the purpose of your email? Do you want your contacts to visit your website, schedule a consultation, or buy a product? Having a single, clear call-to-action in your message and building the content to lead up to it, maximises the effectiveness of the message.
Have a look at the last few emails in your email marketing campaign. Are you making any of these mistakes? Here at BusinessFluid, we help companies like yours boost customer acquisition and improve sales through various strategies which include email marketing. Pop us a line for an expert consultation on this or any other area that will boost your returns.
References:
1http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-stats-list