As the years have gone by, email marketing has proved its mettle no matter what. It is something to reckon with, especially when it comes to conversions and customer engagement. A huge part of email marketing today isn’t as efficient as it potentially can be. Many times, emails aren’t targeted to customers or contain personalized content. Apart from this, sometimes emails are not sent out at the time of maximum impact. In this article, we have identified seven signs that your email program might need some retooling.
Email Blasts Instead of Customer Dialogue
Customers these days are savvy who don’t need to be sold with aggression. As time has gone by, they have become adept at blocking out content they don’t need. However, if the content is relevant, they might be able to give your company a chance by engaging with it. Make sure to approach them the right way and focus on building a trusting, meaningful relationship instead of blatantly trying to sell your product. Be patient in nurturing the relationship with your subscribers through customer dialogue. Then, automate your campaign to send meaningful content to your subscribers, which adds value to their day.
Manual Email Campaigns
Marketers who indulge in manual email marketing campaigns tend to work much harder than those who go for marketing automation. Manual data analysis, list creation, setting up calendar invites etc., to reach out to every customer can be time-consuming and cumbersome. Marketing automation allows business owners to easily adjust their campaigns in response to customer behaviour, including strategically sending drip emails. Automation can help make things easier if a customer clicks to get more information on a product or service. On top of this, they provide a meaningful route to scale up customer engagement significantly.
Sub-Par Targeting and Segmentation
This strategy might be the most critical point in this list. Almost every email marketing campaign relies heavily on micro-segmenting a database and targeting the leads in it. Response rates will be positively affected by the relevance levels of the delivered message, which in turn affects the conversion rates. If you work with a third party for email campaign management, they can use demographics, buyer journey, purchase history, position in the sales funnel etc., as criteria for segmentation. Segmentation will help allow meaningful content to reach your subscribers, which is not generic but relatable.
Plateauing Results
An agile email marketing strategy is a successful one. However, all effective email marketers are aware that their strategies need to be overhauled and refreshed from time to time due to the constant evolution in subscriber lists and the changes in innovations. Marketers need to manage performance and data analytics to know what is working and what isn’t for their campaigns. If you see your response or click-through rates plateau, why not go for a different strategy? If you cannot manage it yourself, you can always turn to the experts that will help fetch you actionable results.
Struggling for Time
Small businesses with limited resources often fall prey to the problem of time. They are constantly short on time to fulfil most of their email marketing activities. For instance, you might find the time to create your content but run short of it while designing or delivering it. Here you need to decide whether to manage everything in-house or hire an email agency for the same. Email marketing can be time-consuming, and the agency might help you with some of the responsibilities. These include one or multiple areas that you might be juggling at the same time.
Emails Not Getting Delivered to Inboxes
If you are having a hard time getting your emails delivered to the customer’s inbox, you might want to look at your IP reputation. It is essentially a score that email services use to decide if you are a ‘good’ emailer or not. Bad emailers are often guilty of shooting bilk emails, spam emails, blasts etc. it is easy to get a lousy IP rep but relatively hard to improve. It is a good idea to shoot bulk marketing communications through a dedicated email marketing service specializing in this and not your business email service. There are several reasons for the email delivery failure, and marketers need to ponder over that.
Lack of a Roadmap
It is safe to say that your business is set up for failure if it doesn’t have a clearly defined path or a proper email marketing roadmap in place. Email marketing is one the most cost-effective mediums of marketing that deliver high ROIs. Plan before you go ahead, as haphazard actions will lead your company nowhere. In case you are unable to design one yourself, there is no harm in seeking outside help.
