In order for your company to succeed online, your email marketing strategy must succeed. Email marketing is the best way to connect with your customers because there are more email accounts worldwide than there are Facebook and Twitter accounts combined.
Statistics have found that 70% of people always open emails from their favourite companies. So, the challenge is to become one of your customers’ favourite companies, and to do this you need to have a really great email marketing strategy!
In this blog post, we’re going to discuss 5 reasons why your email marketing strategy may be failing, and present ways you can fix it!
1. No Strategy
Perhaps one of the biggest reasons email marketing strategies fail is because there is no clearly defined strategy in place!
So what exactly do we mean by ‘Email Marketing Strategy’?
An email marketing strategy allows you to market your products, services, and brand via email. It also helps you to nurture warm leads, and create strong, long-lasting relationships with customers.
Email marketers with no strategy tend to be very inconsistent with their timing and messaging. For example, a customer buys a lamp from your online lighting store. They don’t receive an email from you asking how they like the lamp, or with a 10% voucher off their next lamp. Instead, you send out a generic email to everyone on your list 6 months later because you want to shift some excess stock, lightbulbs. Sure, the customer might actually need lightbulbs and you’ll get lucky. But, chances are, the customer will have forgotten about you and delete the email before even opening it. Or worse, report spam.
To avoid ugly situations like this, you need to create an email marketing strategy that ensures you are at the forefront of your customers’ minds, so when they need lighting products, they come to you. Draw up a schedule, for example:
- Courtesy Email — 1 week after sale
- Ask for a review — 4 weeks after sale
- Special offer — 6 weeks after sale
And so on. The key is to always make your objectives clear.
To make your strategy even more effective, try doing some research on prime email-opening times.
2. Not Engaging Enough
The bottom line is this: if your email is not engaging, you won’t grab anyones attention. Studies have proven that people who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people that do not receive email offers. You can’t afford to miss out on an opportunity like this just because your email marketing strategy is a little behind the times, no one can.
We live in a visual world. 65% of users prefer emails that are mostly made up of images, because images grab our attention. No one wants to open an email, even one that promises a ludicrous offer, and be greeted with a brick wall of text.
Bringing me on to my next point: no one wants to read an email, full stop, unless it offers them something. Offering something doesn’t always have to mean ‘money-off’ or ‘free delivery’. It could be a thank you message, or an image or video that you find online that might appeal to your customers, brighten up their day a little.
An engaging email is also a personalised email. If you do a simple thing like addressing your customers by name you’ll be rewarded with loyalty because it shows that you care. Happy Birthday messages also go down a treat!
3. Boring Subject Lines
64% of people say they open emails solely because of the subject line. Take a look at the last 3 marketing emails you sent, would you open them if they arrived in your inbox among hundreds of others?
Your subject line has to be attention-grabbing because it is the only thing persuading users to open your email.
There are many different ways to approach this. You could go for the no nonsense approach:
- 15 New Job Matches for You
- 20% off for Students!
These subject lines get to the point, so the user knows exactly what’s going to be inside. There’s also the ‘hurry, hurry!‘ time’s running out approach:
- Last Chance for Free Delivery!
- 50% OFF EVERYTHING — TODAY ONLY!
This approach is useful as it gives an impression of scarcity to your customers. CAPs also helps to add a sense of urgency.
A risky, but effective, approach is the funny subject line. A great example that popped up in my Promotions tab this week was from Wowcher:
- You’re so vein, I bet you think these deals are about you. And they are.
This stood out among the masses of ‘20% off’s because it’s witty and it made me laugh, even if only for half a second. It also cleverly lets the user know that this offer is related to vein treatment in some way. However, Wowcher’s email marketing strategy is more solid than a few funny subject lines, all of their email promotions are local to the user that receives them.
Try experimenting with the methods above and find out what works best for you.
4. You’re Still Not Optimized for Mobile
Do you know how many emails, out of the millions sent every day, are opened on mobile devices?
48%. Practically half of all emails.
Being optimized for mobile is not a choice anymore, it’s a necessity. To begin mobile optimization, you’ll want to follow these three steps:
1. Images need to be smaller
It takes time to download images on a mobile device, and the longer your email takes to download, the less people are going to wait around to read it. You should also make sure that your images adjust to fit the screen size of the device they are being viewed on.
2. CTA buttons need to be bigger
Although images need to shrink for a quicker download, call-to-action buttons should actually be larger on mobile devices. This is because fingers are a lot chunkier than mouse cursors, and you want your users to find you as effortlessly as possible!
3. Responsive Templates
This is possibly the most important point, because if you’re the kind of person that gets dizzy just looking at code then you’re going to want to invest in email templates that will help you fully optimize for mobile. Check out Aqueous to create FREE email responsive templates.
5. You Don’t Test
You could follow all of the steps mentioned in this blog and your email marketing strategy would still fail — if you didn’t run tests!
Testing is the core to improving your strategy because it allows you to find out everything you need to know about your customers.
- Do they prefer funny or no nonsense subject lines?
- When are they most likely to open their emails?
- Do they respond better to image-heavy emails?
These are just a few of the things you need to know about your customers in order to create a successful email marketing strategy. So, get testing!
Like this post? Check out 12 Ways to Grow your Email List!