Bloggers, businesses, freelancers and marketers use email marketing as an effective tool to build their online or offline business. It's one of the effective marketing strategies that convincingly crush much hyped social media. But very less percentage of online marketers use it correctly. Creating effective email campaigns requires several technical and non-technical skills. Your initial attempts may fall apart completely, but gradual refinement in the entire campaign creation process can help you leverage this excellent marketing tool to the fullest. If you're new to this, make sure you're not making the following mistakes that may ruin your campaigns.
You're only interested in hardcore marketing
This is the biggest mistake done by new email marketing enthusiasts. Nobody loves sales pitches in every other mail after signing up for receiving some good and useful stuff. Professional email marketing specialists combine optimized sales pitches with the regular 'Stuff' subscribers love to receive in their inbox. This can be done in two ways. Either you create separate emails for both (sales pitches & stuff) and pipeline them intermittently or you amalgam them in such a way that a subscriber cannot differentiate between both. The latter approach is tricky and requires some experience before you start getting positive results from it.
You only design HTML emails
Every individual has its own preferences when it comes to reading emails. The difference in these preferences is due to several reasons. Some simply prefer rich HTML emails while others love to dig in simple text emails. Good email marketing services have the option to let subscribers choose the type of email (HTML, plain text, mobile) they prefer. If you're designing either simple text emails or just rich HTML emails, you're lessening the reach and scope your entire email campaign. Design both versions to get better CTR (click-through-rate) and conversions.
You never provide complete contact details
Nobody appreciates anonymity when it comes to online marketing and selling. You marketing efforts are based on your strong connection with your subscribers. It's all about trust and authority. Your subscribers must know you and your contact details before you pitch for any products or services. In other words, if you strive to make a personal connection with your subscribers, you can expect much better results. You must ensure that your email contains complete contact information with a link to your profile page. This not only increases confidence amongst the potential buyers but also establish you as a trusted source of information.
You undermine good copywriting
Persuasive writing is an art that is mastered by few. You must invest in getting a professional copy for your sales campaign to get a decent rate of conversions. Hire a professional writer to get a persuasive email copy that uses human psychology for getting more leads. Sometimes, a well-written copy alone does all the magic and you get unprecedented positive results. I'll strongly suggest you to get professional services for the same as you'll recover the invested money very easily. In the end, it's all about mindset and realizing of importance of good persuasive sales copy.
You fail to embed alluring call to action buttons
If you're designing a rich HTML email devoid of any call to action buttons or banners, you're ensuring the sales campaign is dead even before the first subscriber receives your email. Unless you don't surround your persuasive sales copy with equally alluring call to action buttons, you cannot expect a decent CTR from your list. Sometimes we do the opposite in over-enthusiasm. Flooding your email with dozens of extremely loud call to action buttons can only increase the unsubscribe rate. You must take a balanced approach by choosing targeted locations for placing optimized call to action buttons that increases the possibility of clicks.
You never include working unsubscribe link
Yes, a non-working or absent unsubscribe link can make you famous as a spammer in quick time. Brand and reputation management are two important aspects to deal with when selling goods (digital or tangible) or services through World Wide Web. One frustrated customer can do significant damage to your marketing efforts by posting about this shortcoming on various social media platforms. And if his rants are picked up by some power users, you cannot control the damage. To avoid this disaster, you must ensure that every single marketing email contains working unsubscribe link.
Your email list is not organic
Some desperate newbies don't hesitate to build their email list overnight. There are good number of individuals and companies who're selling millions of email addresses collected through different means to affiliate marketers. No matter how good your email campaign is, if the list is not built in an organic way, you're going to invite trouble in the form of a ban from your ISP or a lawsuit from a furious email owner. Use a blog and customized landing pages to build your list in an organic way so that your email campaigns are received well by the qualified potential customers.
You prefer free email marketing solutions
If you're really serious about your email campaigns and care for better results, you must stay away from free or cheap email marketing solutions. These free solutions bring unsatisfied subscribers, lingering danger of receiving a ban from ISP, crippling revenue and a bad reputation. On the other hand, smart email marketing services like AWeber (aff) and MailChimp (aff) takes your email campaigns to the next level with tons of useful features. This significantly improves the overall subscriber experience and that is most important for long term gains. In a nutshell, professional email marketing solutions creates a win-win situation for both the ends.
You've not created an effective follow-up retention cycle
You can lose substantial amount of revenue in the absence of proper subscriber retention cycle. Sometimes, subscribers bounce back from the landing page without taking any action. Same thing applies to inactivity of subscribers after completing a step towards your sales funnel. An effective email campaign not only tracks these anomalies but also trigger optimized follow-up emails to retain incomplete or inactive leads. You can also optimize unsubscribe confirmation email in an attempt to get back the subscriber. These follow-up cycles are often ignored by new and inexperienced marketers resulting in fast shrinkage of their email list combined with low conversions.
You hate web analytics
This is one of the best inventions that are so essential for anyone who market or sells anything online. I've talked about optimized emails in almost every section above - but how to know what's optimized and what's not? That's where web analytics plays a big role! You get real data to play with that helps you in improving almost every aspect of your email campaign. All modern email marketing solutions provides tight integration of popular web analytics systems. This way you can not only track and collect vital email campaign data but can also implement split testing based on different data sets collected over time.
You don't value your subscribers
Marketing expert Derek Halpern is well known for his unique techniques based on human psychology to get more sales and leads. He always replies individual emails received from his subscribers. And these replies are not sent through an automated system. He himself writes a personalized email to address the query or issue raised by the subscriber. This is a classic example of creating a strong connection with your subscribers. This also shows how much you value each subscriber and how much you regard their views and feedback. If you really want to make it big, you have to understand that you're dealing with humans, not with a bunch of email addresses.
