Email Marketing Tactics To Rejuvenate Channel Performance

The stories around the death of email marketing are shared quite often and to me are high on hype and low on reality. The truth is that in terms of customer acquisition and retention, email marketing continues to hit the target more than not and can easily outperform other tactics which have become more popular of late like social media.

Thankfully for email marketers, email is not is not going anywhere, frankly, it's on the rise. According to research, people who receive promotional emails about products end up spending 138% more money than people who did not get offers. And, if you’re not reaping these results, your marketing campaigns may need some debugging.

The trouble with email marketing

The real issue with the channel is that email marketing is hard, but that doesn't mean it's dead. It's a daily grind and you just have to dedicate enough resources to it -- as many resources as you dedicate to sales. But before you can dedicate proper resources to email marketing, you owe it to your bottom line to audit your strategies and alleviate the most common pain points that make email marketing so tough:

1. Your emails never reach their destinations

Forget about open rates for a second, and push aside those click-through data points. What if emails are getting lost on their way to their target inboxes? Email validation, an often overlooked part of a successful strategy, ensures your emails make it to their destinations, which improves the accuracy of statistics for any campaign. Consider partnering with a company that checks emails and are known for its highly accurate service, to validate all your emails and improve your sender score.

Andrew Blazewicz, Email Checker co-founder, shares the behind-the-scenes view of what makes email validation so important. "Every mail server has a sender score," he explains. "It's a score between zero and 100. With a higher sender score, the majority of your emails are going to go into people's inboxes. A lower sender score means your emails are going into spam or junk mail folders." Lower still, he warns, and you risk being entirely blacklisted by major servers like Google and Yahoo.

2. You don't know which tactics work best

Your email marketing numbers are all over the place. One email works well. The next falls flat. The third barely gets off the ground. What gives? The problem might be that your team isn't judiciously evaluating emails to see what elements work best. A/B testing is the solution.

There are plenty of software solutions that work with email marketing platforms like MailChimp and allows you to experiment with A/B split testing to pinpoint the "little things" that make all the difference. Is it the title? The call to action? An embedded image? A/B tests can show which parts of your email marketing are hitting their targets and which are falling short.

3. Your content isn't converting

One of the toughest questions of all is "Why is amazing content not moving the needle?" The answer could be that the content is not addressing your audience's most pressing concerns. You might need to supply your prospects with some knowledge before you hit them with your sales pitch. Sheridan calls this approach "assignment selling." In his book, he notes that you have "earned the right to ask more of the prospect" when you assign them presales reading.

He says, "We should be looking for ways to help our prospects become more educated before we talk with them the first time, and then we continue to educate them throughout the sales process." It's not the time to bury your email marketing; it's time to redouble your efforts on it. Make a few thoughtful, pragmatic tweaks and employ the right tools, and you can tap into email's league-leading ROI.

4. Sending image only based emails

You will be shocked to know that just 33% of the subscribers have images turned on by default, which makes sending only image-based emails senseless. Your email is likely to display as empty boxes and will never be read by 67% of the audience. Images are an obvious choice for fashion brands, clothing house and travel companies. Therefore, keeping only images might seem a picturesque option, but it has many negative repercussions.

Also, text-based emails have a 40% higher click-through rate than a picture or image-based emails. Always focus on inserting a link to the web version of your email. The more you focus on these aspects of the email template, the higher will be your chances to reach the inbox of the customers.

5. Error in email design

If the emails don’t display properly, more than 72% of the customers are likely to delete your messages. One of the quickest fixes is making the emails mobile-friendly. With technology playing a crucial role, customers prefer to read the emails on a mobile device. Therefore, you simply cannot afford error in email design. If your email doesn’t look great on a smartphone, you will lose the potential attention of the customers before they bring in revenue. Furthermore, focus on image to text ratio, which plays an important part in deciding the fate of your email. According to research, 80:20 is the text to image ratio for better viewing and improved customer retention.

6. Ignoring the trust factor

A cardinal mistake in email marketing is overlooking to build trust with the email subscribers. Sending messages from a generic email address such as ‘noreply@abc.com’ or ‘support@xyz.com’ never build trust in the target audience. An email received from a real person, generate and inspires trust and urges people to take the desired action. Furthermore, it is a shady approach to not include the unsubscribe link in the email. Always allow the customers to leave the campaign without putting stones in their way.

7. Ignoring analytics

It’s one thing to know the open rate of your email campaign and it’s another to pay attention to how they are working. As a marketer, you need to know how your subscribers are interacting with the messages. Are they reading it or just opening and deleting the messages. Ignoring the analytics will lead to serious issues to the marketing campaign and affect the marketing automation to a great extent.

8. Gathering leads organically

Email databases are very sensitive ecosystem and if you're not providing value through relevant content, personalisation or using segmentation to cut down the frequency of emails sent to the same contact you will start to see more unsubscribes to subscribers. To ensure a healthy balance of new leads to your email database make sure you have a database subscribe option on your site and social media pages so you can migrate users from channels like social media to your email database.

Pro tip! Improve your email acquisition by running lead campaigns on social media, Adwords and display to supplement your organic sign ups.

Ignore email marketing at your own peril

Now that you have the tools to debug your email marketing efforts will you be more likely to commit to the channel? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts about eMail marketing.

• Set Up An Abandon Basket Drip Marketing Campaign
• 5 Benefits Of Using CRM For Your Business
• 10 Emails Every eCommerce Site Should Have
• SEO Spam Emails - Can We Put A Stop To This?
• 5 Free Email Suite Options
• Email Personalization Mistakes to Avoid (And How to Fix Them)
• Email Marketing Tactics To Rejuvenate Channel Performance

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