Of all the marketing channels, email is perhaps the most straight-forward and easy for those outside the field to understand. It’s a great engagement tool for existing subscribers, generally enjoys the best ROI of any marketing activity (outside of SEO), and can generate a substantial amount of revenue, depending on the product and industry. But behind the scenes, it takes a lot of work to do it well. Here are the five biggest mistakes we see companies make too often.
Mistake No. 1: Blasting out to your entire list.
First of all, email blasts are lazy. They’re not targeted by product interest, behavior, job title, demographics, geography, or any other way to better personalize email to those on your lists. Because you send the same thing to everyone, the big issue is that such emails often go unnoticed, and can wreak havoc on your open rates and affect your sender reputation and deliverability down the road. Even large companies with resources to segment more effectively end up doing poorly at this. Here’s one recent example from Banana Republic (right) that was sent in August 2020. Outside of the fact that there might be some men who would buy this for a spouse or girlfriend, or perhaps some other reason, there’s very little rationale to send this email to a male audience. Why not segment and lead with clothes for men, for example?
Solution: Personalize and target segments instead. We’ve developed a list of 12 different ways you can target customers. It’s not an exhaustive compilation but these are the core methods marketing pros use to better improve email performance. One key in particular: Think about how you can target emails to those who are most likely to immediately convert (based on behavior or previous purchase). That means working to set up triggers to connect your marketing automation system to your CRM so you can have data on what your users have done.
Mistake No. 2: Not A/B testing your subject lines, sender names, or the email body.
We know email is a grind and in some marketing shops, it can be a full-time, non-stop job. But even with a busy email schedule, there’s really no excuse not to be testing subject lines, sender names, and body copy. For example, think about the reasons for opening an email (there are only 3): The subject line, the preview text, and the sender name. If you look at available data, about 42 percent of email recipients look at the sender name first when considering to open an email, 34 percent look at the subject line first, and 24 percent consider the preview text first. Given that, it would certainly make sense to optimize these to make the emails as attractive as possible to open.
Similarly, email body, layouts and calls to action can have a large impact on click through rates. Changing one call-to-action button could impact the number of website visitors greatly on any given email. So, if you want to get the most people to open and to click, wouldn’t you want to A/B test each to maximize each of those at some point?
Solution: A/B testing involves sending two or more email options to about 20 to 25 percent of your list. The one that performs best is then sent to the remaining 75 to 80 percent. One key is that it’s important to only test on thing at a time. So, if you’re testing the sender name for example, only test that and not anything such as email body copy, calls to action, subject lines, or preview text.
Mistake No. 3: Sending emails to unengaged lists.
Some email marketers still cling to the hope that if they cast an email wide enough to the greatest number of people in their database, they can generate the most revenue for a particular send. And that would be all fine and good if there were no consequences for sending email to unengaged individuals. But sending to those who haven’t engaged with your company’s email in a particular period (say for the last 6 or 12 months) has consequences that can negatively impact email reputations and sender deliverability.
Solution: First, clean up your email lists. For B2B companies in particular, this is critical as their CRM and marketing automation systems may contain a lot of corporate emails, many of which many no longer be valid because of those that change jobs. And often, email that is intended for that individual who has left the company ends up getting forwarded to a spam folder for a new recipient (typically that person’s boss) if it gets forwarded at all. If the email no longer exists, most marketing automation systems will automatically remove hard bounces from any active segments but it’s still important to update that previous individual’s email address. There are many companies now that offer email validation/list cleanup services and use scraping technology to find new email addresses. If you don’t have one, here’s a quick list.
Second, it’s also important to make sure to set a rule that automatically removes those who haven’t engaged (haven’t opened an email) within the last year from any active email lists. Instead, put those individuals in a separate segment and run an email series as a kind of “We want you back” campaign, which can help restore trust between the sender and the recipient.
Mistake No. 4: Not acquiring new email addresses.
The goal of any email program is to overall grow the number of subscribers. If you follow best practices above, you inevitably will lose subscribers. How do you offset that? You have to use methods to continue to gain email addresses for those potentially interested in your content and products.
Solution: Here are some ideas to gain subscribers: 1. Hosting regular webinars, where you provide content in exchange for contact information; 2. Providing content downloads, such as ebooks or whitepapers or even infographics that provide helpful practical tips to those in your target audience; 3. Promoting newsletters, which can include subscribers getting offers for discounts. 4. Creating accessible contact us forms, where users can ask questions. Note: With all of these and the new privacy laws, make sure that people either know they are opting in to receive emails or they have to opt in to receive emails
Mistake No. 5: Not tracking results.
By this we mean two things: First, do you know how well your individual emails are performing? Do you track open rates and total opens? Click-through rates and total clicks? Do you know which emails have generated the most revenue or conversions? The reason to track things like this is that you won’t be able to optimize your future emails without the knowledge of what has performed well in the past. It also makes you probe into why something in particular worked. Did a particular subject line or sender name change improve open rates? Did an email about a discount drive more revenue?
Second, it’s important to track email performance versus other digital marketing channels through broader attribution, in particular, time-decay attribution. For example, you might send an email to a particular individual about an offer that particular week. The individual might click through but not actually convert that day. But, say the individual comes back later that week to take advantage of the offer. From attribution standpoint, the direct traffic will appear as the last-click conversion, but it could be argued that the email, in this case, was really the key touch point to make the purchaser aware of the product and deal. So, it also should receive some credit from a time-decay standpoint.
Solution: Most marketing automation systems / email platforms have basic capabilities to track the performance of the email itself up until the individual goes to the website. The key piece here is to make sure to set up attribution tracking on your email links – the type of tracking will tell you whether the individual converted, purchased or downloaded something. One thing: Whatever attribution tracking platform you use: 1. Make sure to use it all the time; 2. Make sure that the tracking you do is consistent across all channels from an attribution standpoint, not just email. That way, you’ll get a consistent report about what channels are contributing to your results and how they are contributing.
At Marketing Nice Guys, as part of our marketing consulting practice, we can support your marketing automation needs, and help you develop a better email strategy. Contact us to learn more.
