Are you someone who has spent a lot of time researching digital marketing tips and wondering why everyone recommends email marketing when it’s not doing that much for you?
Finances Online currently cite the email marketing potential return on investment (ROI) as 38:1 but note some studies have reported it may be higher – around 44:1.
But how, right? The thing about email marketing is that it is not just “sending an email out to your customers”. It’s also not that hard to put a good email marketing strategy in place but there’s emphasis on the word strategy.
Here at Greenfish Marketing we help businesses like yours get the most out of their email marketing efforts. Here are five of the most common areas you might need to make improvements in to get higher yielding ROI.
1. Segmentation Might Be Letting You Down
Are you sending the same message to every person on your email list? If so, this is the first area for improvement. Segmentation enables you to group your contacts by behaviour or characteristics.
Think about it. Say you’ve just bought a new couch for your living room. Are you going to want to hear about new sofas, couch sales and other things that might entice someone who hasn’t yet invested in their new furniture to buy? You’re not, right? You’d rather hear about tips to keep your new lounge looking good. Maybe see some styling tips or get updated on the latest range of cushions and soft furnishings to hit the showroom floor. Segmentation is as simple as being able to identify which of your customers have bought a couch, and which are still thinking about it.
Of course it can do so much more than that. There’s incredible levels of personalisation available to you once you start grouping your customers and contacts into segments that work for you and your email marketing goals. It’s nowhere near as complicated as it sounds to set up, either. In fact, software automation can do most of the work for you.
2. The Subject Line Doesn’t Stand Out
Yours is just one of 333.2 billion emails being sent every day worldwide and your subject line is the email marketing equivalent of making a good first impression. You want people to want to open your email.
So how can you improve your subject line? Firstly don’t send the same email subject line to every recipient. A/B testing enables you to send a portion of your segmented list one version, and another something different. This lets you see the types of subject lines that perform better and get real data about what your customers do (or don’t) respond to.
Other tips to improve your subject line include:
- Keeping it shorter. Less is more because how much people will see of what you’re written depends on factors like their email client, whether they read their email on a computer or device etc.
- Giving them a reason to open your email. You can do this by highlighting scarcity (think of all those “Last Days” sale reminders you get), making it seasonal or just relevant to your target audience.
- Make use of the preview. This is the text that appears in the inbox before people open your email. You don’t want people to see “Dear Name”, you want to customise that text so they get excited by your email subject, and then understand a bit of context before they open your email.
3. You’re Sending Too Many Emails
Did you know that most people won’t unsubscribe from your communications? They’ll often just mark your messages as spam instead, and “sending too many emails” is usually the reason given.
Not only does this have potential implications for all your future email marketing endeavours – because email providers like Gmail, Outlook etc use metrics like who opens and engages with your email content to decide how useful it is or if it should go in the spam folder – but it can also damage engagement with your customers.
Again, this is why email marketing needs to be a strategy. You need to really think about your customer journey and what actions you want them to take when they’ve heard from you. This will help you work out how many emails you even should be sending to achieve your goals.
4. You’re Not Sending Enough Emails
We know this seems ironic. We just said ‘don’t send too many emails’ and now we’re telling you that you might not send enough. Consistency is key no matter what your email schedule is.
A lot of businesses fall in and out of love with email marketing. Sometimes it’s based around staffing changes and skillset, sometimes it’s about priorities.. You intend to get serious about email marketing so start focusing on collecting emails, but you’re going to get to it when you have enough people on the list to make sending emails worthwhile. Or you’re going to start sending emails out every month to your database, but end of month tasks got you good this time around, so you’ll skip this month’s email and pick it up again next month … or the month after. Then a few months pass and your sales are low so you decide you’ll get back into email marketing and send something out but it doesn’t get the results you want.
Does that sound familiar?
5. The Email Design Isn’t Engaging
This is another point that can be contradictory. Boring, unbranded emails rarely make an impact. At the same time, it’s really easy to over complicate things. The stats vary depending on the source but it’s widely agreed that at least 50% of your recipients are going to read their emails on their phone so your email design has to be responsive so it loads well no matter how people access it. Some email clients also block images which means emails with no text at all have no relevance.
Your design needs to be consistent with your brand, your goals and how your customers interact with your content.
Your Own Email Marketing Team
Are you ready to build out a results oriented, goal focused email marketing strategy? There’s a specialised service from Greenfish Marketing to suit every stage of the digital marketing journey. From startups and small businesses who need help to get everything done to larger ecommerce solutions, we can help you get more out of your email marketing.
If you’d like to know more about how you can have a more effective email marketing strategy, book a complimentary strategy call with Greenfish Marketing today.
