Making your email campaigns perform like a rock-star isn’t easy. So many puzzle pieces go together to have a high converting campaign. If you are a small business owner trying to take it to the next level, we have some advice for you.
First you need to make sure you have a solid email marketing strategy in place. Make sure you have goals in mind, such as trying to get more opens, more clicks or more sales. This way you can identify if changes you are doing are helping or hurting your goals.
Consistency is the key to success. You want to stay consistent with your sending frequency. Build out a content calendar to maybe send your messages on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and keep with that plan. If you send on another day outside of your schedule then tie it to a specific event such as a holiday or birthday email.
While, there are many posts on best practices on email marketing let’s talk about what you are doing wrong.
Bait and Switch Subject Lines
Your subject line is your first impression. It’s true that creative subject lines will get you clicks. Even statistics from convinceandconvert.com say that 33% of email recipients open email based on subject lines alone. But, the user will be left feeling scammed if your subject line has nothing to do with the content inside of the email.Instead use clear and concise subject lines along with content that delivers. You can keep it catchy, creative and fun but make sure your email content corresponds. Skip the bait and switch subject lines for something more credible.
Examples of Catchy, Clear and Concise Subject Lines:
50% off – Start Holiday Shopping Now! 3 Recipes Under 300 Calories
Presale Code Inside for the Holiday Event
Top 10 Lipsticks under $10
Not Keeping Your Data Clean
The data you collect is the bread and butter of your business. Without that quality customer data you cannot communicate with your potential customer. Letting bad data in your front door is damaging your email campaign more than you realize.
Each bad email lead that comes in, harms your sender score. Maybe it was a typo that was unintentional or maybe the fake email address was deliberate. Your ESP closely monitors how many hard bounces you get because it reflects poorly on your business and theirs. Too many hard bounces can get you banned from your ESP.
Having a layer of protection in place can help safeguard your IP reputation and eliminate hard bounces. It is recommended that you clean up your database on a quarterly basis and that you also check your data at point of entry. XVerify is a great tool that can work with your existing webform and check email addresses in real time. Click here to learn more about email verification with XVerify.
Unclear BrandingSwitch up your email templates, but make sure you don’t lose your brand identity. Keep the email header consistent across all of your templates. Don’t change your logo colors or placement. Keep a clear branding identity is important for your long term success.
Remember that in addition to your content, offers and advice it is your brand’s personality that connects with your audience. It’s been proven that losing your brand identity will increase your number of unsubscribes. It could even be one of the reasons you see an increased amount of spam complaints. Customers feel more comfortable when things don’t keep changing each time they open one of your emails.
Not Using Automation
Why are you not using automation? It’s 2016 and automation is available, low cost, and helps streamline your business. Automation helps alleviate some work off your plate so you can focus on other areas of your business. But, if you don’t use automation correctly it can really kill your campaign. You need to have the right plan in place before you even get started.
Setup a welcome campaign to automatically send your new subscribers a sequence of emails to get them familiar with your brand. This is going to help build brand awareness and gain trust with your audience. Don’t immediately try to sell them something, first become their friend. Provide them with valuable information.
Pre-schedule email campaigns so that you don’t have to work on them last-minute. Setup triggers to send special content to people who have ‘clicked’ on a link in one of your previous emails. Use segmentation to help them feel like the information that you are sending is more personalized to them and their needs. Using automation will save you time, and increase your revenues in the long haul.
Sending at the Wrong Time
When is the best time to connect with your audience? Probably at a time that works best with their time zone. You don’t want to just put together an email campaign to a world-wide list and say send it off at 3pm EST. You might get most people within the US responding but what about all those others you are missing?
You want to be able to reach people when they are active in their inbox. If you have already been mailing to your list for a few weeks, your ESP might already be tracking this information. Check with your ESP and see if they have any options on delivering emails based on the subscriber’s time zone.
Again, we would like to recommend that you set up trigger emails. These are best because you can configure them to fly out to the subscriber as soon as they take an action on a previous email.
Consider this scenario – the user has not logged into the inbox in a week. They find an email from you last week and they click a link. Suddenly you send off a brand new email and they receive it because they are already spending time in their inbox. This is going to improve your open rate and your reputation as well as your relationship with the recipient. Krista Barrack is an email verification specialist at XVerify. She helps digital marketers improve email campaign success through data verification. Outside of the office, Krista also enjoys traveling, fitness, reading, and listening to podcasts.
