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11 Common Email Marketing Gaps and Errors

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Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools a marketer can utilize. Have you invested in an email marketing platform yet? If so, how well do you manage your email marketing? Do you feel content with your campaign?

The first sign that a customer is interested in your product or service is when they sign up for your mailing list, so you need to make sure you foolproof your email campaigns. We’ll discuss a few common mistakes that marketers usually make as they strive to create airtight email marketing campaigns.

1. Not Setting Long Term Email Specific Goals

Email marketers that do not have set, long-term goals won’t be able to tell if they are doing well or not. You have nothing to achieve if you aim at nothing. Putting in place clear goals for your email marketing campaign will help guide your efforts. This will make it easier to track progress and establish a benchmark for what, according to you, determines success.

2. Not Investing in List Growth

Building an email list is simple but very important. It’s actually the best way to establish relationships with your customers/potential buyers. Explore the various ways you can encourage people to subscribe to your emails. You could implement these ways on your website, your social media sites, or even with pop up adverts.

3. Failing to Track Email Signup Sources

The power to build and maintain relationships is in your email tracking. Tracking your sources will give you a clear perspective on which medium rakes in most of your subscribers. Omitting this process will leave you in the dark on what your best and  worst channels are (in terms of performance). 

4. Not Utilizing All Your Customer Touchpoints

After approaching a customer, how will you alert them when you receive new stock or if there are any changes to your business in any way? Understanding your brand’s customer contact points, from start to finish, is important. Overlooking these points of contact may cause a shortfall in your customer service delivery. A link back to your subscribe button on all your touchpoints is important for you to build your mailing list.

5. Lack of a Clear Email Value Proposition

A concise value proposition in your emails will make you stand out from the crowd. Email has proven to be the best online marketing channel. Giving specific goal-focused content in your emails will grab the attention of any subscriber that reads your email. It’s not about quantity but the content. This is the backbone of your line of communication.

6. Not Setting Up Triggered Messaging

In this day and age, there’s no shortage of email marketing campaigns. However, triggered messaging is often overlooked. These can range from welcome emails, cart abandonment emails to onboarding sequence emails. The list just goes on. These emails can deepen engagement with your brand, improve customer experience, and deliver upsell opportunities.

7. Not Testing Targeting 

The phrasing of a subject line in an email can either convince or discourage someone from opening it.  Tweaking simple elements like an email line, a call to action (CTA) button, or part of the design can impact conversions. In email testing, one email is split into different versions and compared to see which variant garnered more attention from subscribers. This will ensure that you craft more effective emails based on the insights you gain, resulting in more engagement, leads, and sales.

8. Not Optimizing the Sending-Out Frequency

It’s a big mistake to spam customers with lots of emails, either at once or within a short duration. Bombarding subscribers often results in low open rates. Optimizing your email frequency will ensure that the right subscribers receive the right messages at the right time. This really does have the power to influence both open rates and unsubscribing rates.

9. Upfront Offer Is Unclear

Clarity is the pinnacle of successful communication. Marketers that do not effectively communicate are at high risk of losing their clientele. Your messaging must project exactly what you mean. This will cultivate customer trust in your brand.

10. Lack of Measuring Beyond the ‘Click’

Measuring clicks that are predominantly generated by the same group of Internet users is misleading. You are most likely not engaging with your core audience. 

This is because a minority of the group that clicks on ads (actually) reaches your main website. So you have to find ways to measure conversion beyond just the click-through rate.

11. Cybersecurity & Data Leaks

Careless human error is one of the main causes of data leaks which could result in massive losses for a business. Misspelling an email address and forwarding unsolicited information is a major danger. These are likely to tarnish a company’s reputation. Create clear-cut policies and procedures for sending emails to your staff. Additionally, set up data loss prevention (DLP) software that can also help in this regard. Doing consumer background checks allow you to customize your messaging to your intended audience. If you ever feel like an email address is unscrupulous you may verify by looking up email owner informationonline.

Tips on Effective Email Marketing Strategy

It is really worth your time to give email marketing a shot. The investment is extremely low for the benefits you can gain. Perfect your skills. Engage with your prospects and customers after that initial contact or sale.

Personalize your email content. Most marketers are aware that personalization is important, but many don’t do anything about it. If your emails are relatable they will have more of an impact.

Change the times you send your emails. This way you increase your email open rate.

Ensure you’re building an engaged email list. An engaged audience is more likely to want to keep reading your emails and buy into whatever you’re selling.

Optimize emails for mobile. There are just too many people on their mobiles for you to ignore. Capture the attention of mobile users by ensuring the emails can be viewed easily on these modern devices.

Using public information in your email marketing strategy. Incorporate the use of free public information to help you split your marketing message according to any differentiators that are in place. You will be able to reach the right specific people at the right time through proper means!

Email marketing has come a long way. In this article, we have discussed how effective a marketing tool it actually is. We also learned that, as with many modern tools, there are certain drawbacks. Thankfully this article shows you how to overcome all the common email gaps and errors discussed above.

About the author

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Ben Hartwig

Ben Hartwig is a web operations director at InfoTracer. He authors guides on marketing and entire cybersecurity posture and enjoys sharing the best practices. You can contact the author via LinkedIn.